[Technology Report] More Embedded Features Provide Easier Analog Designs
By building in more value-added features, companies hope to remove some of the hocus-pocus from the analog-design portions of new products. Obviously, these features can't instantly move OEM customers to the cutting edge of performance. But they're preventing the more predictable design errors that tend to scuttle schedules when a ones-and-zeros engineer tries to implement something with voltages that insist on wriggling around. These value-added features are embedded in the...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Simpler Solutions Spark Active ADC Arena
Expert designers are hard to find. So, converter suppliers are making their products easier to use. Some suppliers simplify analog front-end design by choosing alternative architectures. Delta-sigma, both switched-capacitor and continuous-time, simplifies front-end filtering compared to successive-approximation registers (SARs) and pipelines. Another trend sees amplifiers custom-designed for targeted converters. Alternatively, variable-gain amplifiers (VGAs) are being built into the...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Tiny Footprints, Sweet Sounds, And Higher IFs
Two major trends will dominate digital-to-analog converters (DACs) this year. First, competition will intensify to even greater heights thanks to strides made in consumer audio in your home, car, and pocket. Second, DACs for communications systems, where they operate in the transmit chain, are virtually evolving into modulation subsystems while eliminating a few upconversion stages in the process. AUDIO As in other types of analog and...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Amplifiers Preach Painless Performance
The most conspicuous trend in amplifiers is the list of new features that help systems engineers who aren't entrenched analog specialists avoid catastrophic design errors. Consider how it demolishes a system-development schedule when an amplifier that worked perfectly on the bench does nothing but oscillate on the prototype project board. Suppliers have designed more bulletproof amplifiers and created GUI-based design tools so those amplifiers are more apt to behave themselves in real...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Ultracaps, Fuel Cells Redefine Power
Power management is ever-more critical as consumer applications eclipse computer applications and the whole dc-dc converter arena vibrates with innovation. Meanwhile, two trends should have a considerable impact on 2005. First, ultracapacitors will find more applications as prices drop and engineers understand their capabilities relative to batteries. Second, fuel cells will appear in consumer products, from notebooks to active headsets. Instead of plugging in a product to...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Auto Power Apps Bristling; Portables Need Complexity
Power-management activity whirls around dc-dc converters. Yet as Linear Technology founder and CTO Robert Dobkin points out, power management could prove an even greater challenge in battery-powered handhelds than on a server system board (see the figure). Similar thinking led Summit Microelectronics to offer two linkable active points-of-load (POLs)—one four-channel, one six-channel—that implement sequencing,...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] DC-DCs In '05: Better Bricks, Battling POLs, Brighter LEDs
Three trends are emerging in dc-dc converters. First, the news in bricks is all about incredible power densities and efficiencies. Second, differentiation has become a matter of control and distribution architecture for point-of-load (POL) converter makers. And third, while some readers cringe when they see yet another white-LED power story, white LEDs define something of a paradigm for power conversion in products from handhelds to vehicular lighting. ...
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Don Tuite
[Technology Report] Shrinking Features Broaden ASIC Options
The basic premise of ASICs has remained the same over the past decade—integrate as much of the system as possible onto one chip to reduce chip count and system cost. Yet the ability to integrate more on one chip has changed. Advances such as 90-nm lithography are pushing this trend. So is the ability to deposit 10 or more layers of copper metallization to interconnect all of the transistors. Today, ASIC vendors and foundries offer a broad array of design rule sets that...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Jumbo Digital Chips Bank On A "Small" Future
Smaller is better—that's the ongoing mantra within the digital spectrum. At least that's the case for transistors, which are getting mighty small indeed. Today's best production processes are based on 90-nm features. But companies are already working on device structures that will enable manufacturing flows based on 65- and then 45-nm design rules. Yet such small features create a host of challenges like lithography, device structures, leakage currents, and device...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Faster, Denser FPGAs Take On All Markets
Once considered just a logic replacement for small- and medium-scale logic devices, the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) has come into its own as a total system solution. It can replace anything from a few gates to a full custom system-on-a-chip (SoC) ASIC. Advances in silicon fabrication and metallization systems now let the highest-density FPGAs pack over 5 million system gates, several million bits of static RAM, and system support functions such as CPUs, high-speed serial...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] MCUs Sift Through Overlapping Solutions
The microcontroller market is getting larger and more confusing, but oh, the choices! All processor segments from 8 to 64 bits are growing both at the low and high ends, leading to considerable overlap. Increased demand for connectivity has also led to more choices as vendors incorporate 100-Mbit/s Ethernet on-chip. Finally, greater connectivity requires higher levels of security, pushing the need for more hardware. Small, very low-power applications continually insist on...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Transistor-Jammed Chips Rely On Process Progress
More and more transistors per chip. There's simply no way around it as long as there's a need to create faster and smaller systems that consume less power. This will provide more gates for ASICs and greater amounts of storage for memory chips. It will also yield higher throughput for CPUs, digital-signal processors, graphics engines, and other processors. Process technologies have evolved dramatically. Cramming a billion or more transistors on one chip has almost become...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Novel Denser Memories Make Data Rates Sing
"Memories are made of this." That classic line from an old tune is certainly apropos, but maybe we should tweak it to read "memories are made of these." The latest developments in memory technology run the gamut of material technologies, from silicon to silicon-on-insulator to carbon nanotubes to magnetoresistive, ferrorelectric, and phase-change materials, and who knows what else. In their quest to develop the ideal memory chip-a low-cost device that reads and writes data at...
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Dave Bursky
[Technology Report] Waiting On The Arrival Of Little Green Packages
There's no relief for packaging technology: End-users and OEMs are demanding cost-effective solutions that satisfy space constraints and reliability issues. These solutions also should bring products to market faster than methods that try to place everything on one chip, such as the system on a chip (SoC). These challenges are coming from all corners of the electronics industry-consumer electronics, communications, automotive, medical, and industrial applications. They're the...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Get More Flexibility For Less Cost And Size
Industry demands within the passive components sector constitute a rather tall order: a wider range of values, higher-frequency performance characteristics, tighter tolerances, and greater levels of stability, all within small packages. Passive components can be integrated into the same silicon substrate housing memory, logic, and microprocessors. Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) have enabled high-performance and integratable components, like RF circuits, switches,...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Crowded Technology Field Heats Up Displays
Aggressive competition continues in flat-panel-displays (FPDs). LCDs maintain an edge, particularly in desktop monitors, laptops, notebooks, cell phones, and multimedia consumer devices. Now they're making a charge for the large-screen home TV market. Plasma display panels (PDPs) and microdisplays of liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) also are vying for large-screen home TVs. PDPs have gained plenty of consumer attention over the last few years because of their attractive form...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Shrinking Components Pace The Industry
Miniaturization. Lower costs. Lower power dissipation. Smaller form factors. These demands are driving the consumer, medical, communications, automotive, industrial, and military markets. But rapid advances in components are giving design engineers the tools they need to meet these challenges. A host of technologies are competing for many applications in flat-panel displays. LCDs continue to dominate flat-panel displays, but they're feeling the heat from plasma-panel displays...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] ATE Battles Soaring IC Device Complexity
Highly integrated IC devices like systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) are seeing pin counts balloon, creating untold complexity issues. As a result, it's becoming harder for automatic-test-equipment (ATE) systems to boost performance levels at lower costs per pin tested. Commercial ATE systems have kept pace with these challenges with help from design for test (DFT), built-in self test (BIST), and other methodologies. But the future looks even more imposing as testing costs rocket...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Gear Accommodates Evolving Markets
Traditional test and measurement instruments—oscilloscopes, logic and spectrum analyzers, multimeters, and signal sources—haven't lagged behind the advances occurring in electronic device technology. In some cases, they're exceeding the T&M needs of many designers. Electronic-circuit data rates moving to gigahertz speeds have wrought various signal-integrity issues. Sophisticated DSP algorithms help ultra-high-speed T&M instruments measure more accurately to...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Pin-Count And Cost Issues Spark T&M Breakthroughs
The opportunities and challenges for test-equipment manufacturers have never been greater. Traditional T&M instruments are blazing a path toward greater performance capabilities for faster, wider-bandwidth, and more accurate test equipment for high-speed, gigahertz-rate, serial data buses and an expanding RF communications arena. Also, new market opportunities beckon instrument manufacturers to come forth with test gear that suits their needs. These include the consumer, automotive,...
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Roger Allan
[Technology Report] Software Development Tools Going Embedded
The real-time operating-system (RTOS) ruckus is all but a murmur this year. Linux is well established with the 2.6 kernel and a single-source code package for memory-management-unit (MMU) and MMU-less processors. Other major RTOS vendors presented new releases as well. But now, platforms and tools are key. The new releases are only polished rather than major technology improvements. RTOS vendors are working to provide an extensive, integrated package to developers. The...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Low-Risk COTS Keeps A Cutting Edge
COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) products represent dependable, predictable, long-term solutions. But they also can deliver cutting-edge technology—and it doesn't take an expert to build a complete custom solution. COTS can provide the hardware base for software developers to deliver new products, and a hardware platform for adding custom hardware. COTS covers a wide range of products. Yet as a group, it has fared better than most of the electronics industry, because many...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] Embedded Strides Swiftly Down The Standard Path
Platforms give embedded designers a standard base to build upon, be it hardware or software. These platforms and standards gain greater importance as developers interact with each other more, and as final products start to interact. Driving all of this is the need to lower costs and power consumption while decreasing time-to-market. In 2005, that need will become even more pressing. Form factors, from the compact Mini-ITX to the large AdvancedTCA, provide standard hardware...
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William Wong
[Technology Report] The All-In-One, Do Everything Handset
Cell phones may be the perfect all-time electronic product. Worldwide sales topped 670 million in 2004. In 2005, we should see sales top 700 million phones, with China being the largest market with over 250 million units. We love our cell phones. They get better each year while cost stays at a reasonable level. But it doesn't get any easier for the designers who continuously try to cram more features and gadgets into each new model. Color screens and built-in still cameras are...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] The Wireless Business Sliced And Diced
Wireless is where it's at. We have single-chip radios for virtually any application. It's cheap, easy, and fun to make virtually any product wireless. Just choose your technology and protocol, and away you go. WI-FI From the very beginning, Wi-Fi has been a true winner. In only a few years, this sophisticated technology has evolved into an all-purpose wireless tool. Single-chip, multiband, multimode versions are now available to meet the...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Alternative Tech Ready To Challenge Cable/DSL Lead
Today, broadband services in the form of cable TV and DSL lines give us high-speed Internet services as well as Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) in some areas. But these high-speed services are used by just over 20% of U.S. households, according to the Department of Commerce. It's a geographical and socio-economic situation. About 80% of U.S. households have an online connection, yet only about a quarter of those have the high-speed link. Compare that to Japan with over 80% high-speed...
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Chip, Product Bonanza Drives Comm To The Top Of The Charts
"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge."—Robert Naisbitt in his 1982 book Megatrends. Naisbitt certainly got it right more than 20 years ago, yet the situation is even worse today. Not only are we more inundated than ever before with information, but the problem has worsened simply because it's now so easy to communicate it. Of course, one of the main culprits is the Internet, which arrived in earnest about 10 years after Naisbitt's book hit the stands....
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Louis E. Frenzel
[Technology Report] Enter The Age Of Design For Manufacturability.
The broad adoption of virtual prototyping and physical synthesis tools have helped reduce the number of synthesis/place-and-route iterations. They also helped RTL coders avoid what they've long dreaded—having to become physical-design experts. But these tools only work as well as the underlying assumption that drawn layouts equal on-silicon circuitry. Each new sub-100-nm process generation increasingly renders this assumption invalid. Because silicon feature sizes are now...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] ESL: The Post-RTL Answer?
The EDA industry's worst-kept secret is that the RTL design flow is broken. Implementing complex systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) in RTL simply takes too long and is too error-prone. Add the fact that simulation of RTL is too slow to effectively cover the entire design, and you have a design process that needs fixing. With traditional ASIC design flows struggling to accommodate complex SoCs, designers are beginning to turn to electronic-system-level (ESL) methodologies. An ESL design...
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David Maliniak
[Technology Report] Squeezed In The Middle: EDA In The Hourglass Era
Design automation has passed through distinct eras in its history, marked largely by seismic shifts in abstraction. The last great shift, back in the 1980s, saw Verilog lose its proprietary status and become open source. That's when the predominant design paradigm moved from gate level to the register-transfer (RT) level. Since then, other improvements in the IC design flow have helped keep design costs more manageable (Fig....
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David Maliniak
[Editorial] Retaining Technology Leadership In 2005
Most pundits in the semiconductor marketplace expect 2005 to be relatively flat, with expansion returning in '06 and strengthening in '07. Likewise, you engineers designing tomorrow's chips and the products they power are cautiously optimistic about the year ahead. According to a quick Web poll of our readers, the majority of you have a personally positive outlook for the coming year (60% say it will be good with a stable workflow and/or strong growth). I'm optimistic,...
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Mark David
[POV: Point Of View] Digital Media Drives The Broad Bandwagon
Demand for broadband will drive the industry over the next few years. Wireless and wireline communications will converge within the enterprise, creating personal home and corporate networking that delivers speedy, seamless Internet and communications access. Broadband will continue to redefine the delivery of information when and where you need it, and it's a significant focus for major silicon providers. Broadband also is going mainstream. In the U.S., 53% of Internet...
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Henry Samueli
[POV: Point Of View] Subpixel Rendering For High-Res Mobile Displays
The exploding display industry is riding the wave of advances in cell phones, digital still cameras, digital video cameras, MP3 players, media players, portable DVD players, and portable GPS devices. These products are fueling the demand for higher-performance color LCDs, as OEMs increase functionality to differentiate their products from the competition. Smart cell phones are more than phones. They can include theme calendars, imaging systems, Internet access, GPS, and even...
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Joel Pollack
[POV: Point Of View] Digital Motion Control To Drive Power Efficiency
The Energy Information Adminstration estimates that world energy use will grow by 54% between now and 2025. The organization also expects most of this energy to come from nonrenewable fossil-fuel sources. Coupled with other considerations, such as the need to control the growth of carbon-dioxide emissions, statistics like these emphasize the pressing need to improve energy efficiency. Improvement is more than a desirable requirement-it's fundamental to the sustainable prosperity of the...
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Alex Lidow
[Pease Porridge] What's All This Resonance Stuff, Anyhow?
I was walking down a hallway on the top floor of NSC's building D, when something I heard made me suspicious. It sounded like a series of tiny clicks rattling around the hallway. I stopped and slapped my thigh to make a sharp sound. I heard TICK-TICK, tick-tick, tick-tick. I was surprised, because there was no obvious reason why this hallway should do this. It even had a carpeted floor. I tried the slap in several other hallways—and in tile bathrooms—and got almost none of this...
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Bob Pease
[Design FAQs] Designing With Structured ASICs Sponsored by: ALTERA CORP.
What makes the structured ASIC cost effective? It's a matter of per-unit cost, including all of the associated overhead, in volume. Many factors must be added up to determine the final per-chip cost, such as the quantity needed, the cost of the mask set, the design and verification overhead, and the size of the chip. Structured ASICs provide a "middle ground" between field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and solutions based on full standard cells. When you examine...
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Dave Bursky
[Design FAQs] System-On-A-Chip Design With Platform ASICs Sponsored by: LSI LOGIC CORP.
Where does the platform ASIC position itself versus other ASIC solutions? A platform ASIC fills the design gap between the full cell-based ASIC design, which typically requires about 25 masks and a 12- to 18-month design cycle, and the in-system instantly configurable and off-the-shelf field-programmable gate array. Platform ASICs and their cousins, the structured ASICs, often can provide a lower-cost solution than a cell-based design when component volumes are a few...
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Dave Bursky
[Design FAQs] PC-Board Design Sponsored by: CADENCE DESIGN SYSTEMS
How do I combine Spice, IBIS, S-parameter, package, and pc-board models? With many board designs incorporating multigigahertz interconnect speeds, vendors often supply encrypted transistor-level Spice models rather than IBIS models. Designers must work with suppliers to obtain consumable models that will fit with their specific design environment. How do I efficiently enforce constraints in today's high-speed pc-board designs? First, you...
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David Maliniak
[Design FAQs] Power Management For Portable Equipment Lighting Sponsored by: NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR
What is behind the move to white LEDs in portable equipment? The trend for color displays in handhelds has produced a parallel move to white LEDs for LCD backlighting. White LEDs provide the desired appearance for backlighting color LCDs. They're also more rugged and efficient, simpler to drive, and smaller, thinner, and far less noisy than the cold-cathode florescent tubes previously used for backlighting. Why use driver ICs for white...
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Sam Davis
[Design FAQs] Evaluating Timing IP Sponsored by: TRUE CIRCUITS INC.
A phase-locked loop (PLL) is pretty basic. How much can one IP vendor's PLL differ from another's? While the high-level PLL schematic is simple, the simplest PLLs don't perform well. They all accept a reference clock and generate another clock, frequency multiplied and/or phase-locked to the reference. Yet PLLs from different IP vendors offer different features, flexibility, and output quality. The right PLL can make the design of the clocking system easier and more...
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Don Tuite
[Quick Facts] Architecture Counts In Verification Sponsored by: VERISITY CORP.
One Environment Fits All The universe of verification encompasses a number of modalities, including software simulation, accelerated simulation, and emulation. Historically, users of these various modes of verification were forced to use separate environments for each. Those users of verification environments with true system-level requirements tend toward emulation. But in today's market, there are verification technologies that support all three modes, allowing...
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David Maliniak
