DESIGN-TOOL LEVERAGE
With the Synopsys partnership, Honeywell was looking for a way to reduce the risk of creating really large ASICs. Because its experience had been limited to the 1- to 1.5-Mgate level, Honeywell engineers felt that the company required a major leap to get up to the 10-Mgate level. Kirchner explained that Synopsys had not only the tools and the flow, but also a design services group that had already built a number of 15-Mgate commercial ASICs.
"Synopsys also has an umbrella over its tool flow that allows collaboration across multiple design sites at different geographical locations," says Kirchner. One of Honeywell's existing customers is already porting a previous design to the 150-nm technology using the Synopsys flow and collaborative environment.
At this point, Honeywell is following the Cypress life cycle by going through all of the normal gates Cypress process engineers would go through when bringing up a new technology. As of mid-July, says Kirchner, Honeywell and Cypress were no more than two or three months away from the production-upgrade gate. He notes that the SOI technology exhibits the same defect density and yields as Cypress' commercial bulk technology, yielding "very well" on half-million gate designs that have run through the process, as well as on a 5-Mbit SRAM.
DIFFERENT GOALS
Chris Seame, Cypress' executive vice president of technology and manufacturing, says that when Honeywell came forward, Cypress had not made any decisions about SOI but had been looking into the technology for several reasons. Among them are its potential for alleviating problems with power/speed tradeoffs for high-performance parts, its promise to ameliorate some of the soft-error problems prevailing throughout the industry, and the ability of SOI 1T DRAM cells to eliminate the scaling problem of the capacitor in 1T-1C DRAM.
"For us," he says, "it was a fairly low-cost way of getting into SOI and trying out some of our circuits and seeing what we could see. We've now learned that SOI works and that we can make it in our factories with only slight modifications to our baseline technology." He adds that Cypress already had an MRAM effort of its own under way, and he expects that something will come of that in the near future.
OPPORTUNITIES BEYOND SILICON
Well before September 11, 2001, the U.S. military had plans for using Internet Protocol as the common element in a web of C4ISR systems. As such, it would make more data available more quickly, and in a usable form, to intelligence services, battlefield commanders, and tactical units.
Of course, the attacks of September 11 highlighted the need for up-to-date intelligence sharing. In mil-speak, stove-piping was a major failure mode.
Government investment in new programs to push clear, useful information to those who need it most is expanding. For example, in January 2004, DoD awarded a total of $944 million in contracts to Lockheed and Boeing to develop the next generation of satellites for the U.S. military. The two companies will compete for a $6 billion development and hardware contract to be awarded in 2006.
While Lockheed and Boeing are traditional military contractors, the government isn't limiting participation to that side of the economy. The military recognizes that while the Internet may have evolved from ARPANET, in today's world the commercial sector is the principal source of ongoing innovation.
However, the government isn't limiting participation to that side of the economy. In an article in Intercom, The Journal of the Air Force C4 Community, Lt. Gen. Tom Hobbins, deputy chief of staff for warfighting integration, speaking of the Air Force-led Transformational Satellite program, says that "two years of architecture-based studies cast the TSAT from the outset as a component of a joint, interagency network architecture. Potential technical approaches balanced industry and commercial solutions with more specialized capability." [Emphasis added.]
Invitations to participate are on the table. According to a National Security Agency Web site, "Achieving [this] vision requires substantial augmentation of today's information-sharing technology features and new technology capabilities. The preponderance of GIG functionality will be realized through leveraging commercial technologies and standards, augmented as necessary to meet unique DoD mission-critical needs for availability, integrity, confidentiality, access control, and non-repudiation.
"Products available today will not satisfy many of the capabilities needed to support IA in the net-centric GIG vision. With an emphasis on commercial solutions for the GIG, a coordinated interface with commercial, contractor and government development communities is essential. A spiral/evolutionary approach to development over the next several years will deliver incremental improvements as new technologies become available." [Emphasis again added.]