Connecting Transistors— and Measuring Their Performance

Transistors are a dime a dozen—or maybe a dime a billion. When it comes to designing a state-of-the-art mobile device or a high-performance server, it’s how you put the transistors together that counts. And once you’ve put them together, you need to be able to make accurate, repeatable high-speed measurements to confirm that they’ll comply with relevant specs and work reliably to fulfill your customers’ expectations.

The design and test of high-performance combinations of transistors were both focuses of DesignCon, held in Santa Clara in January. Dr. Hermann Eul, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Mobile & Communications Group, addressed design as he took to the DesignCon keynote stage Jan. 28, commenting that Intel is good at making transistors. He followed up that claim with praise for attendees’ abilities to string them together to build ever-more complex and desirable gadgets.

“I am excited to have the opportunity to speak to the brilliant leaders of this industry—the design engineers who make all this happen,” said Eul, adding, “We are in the middle of an exciting shift in our lifestyles with respect to the devices we carry and interact with.

Addressing the test aspect was Siegfried Gross, vice president and general manager of Agilent’s Electronic Test Division, speaking at a Jan. 29 press conference. Citing Agilent’s efforts to help customers continually improve their products, he said, “Things change when you measure them.”

Gross said that Agilent, whose electronic measurement business will operate under the Keysight Technologies banner by year end, cited specific areas on which the company will focus: energy and power, mobile devices, cloud computing, wireline communications, and the semiconductor technology rollover to smaller nodes, larger wafers, and new structures, largely in service to the aforementioned areas.

Gross noted several specific technology initiatives that present measurement challenges, including efforts to increase basic baud rates, to achieve higher symbol rates for a given baud rate (using modulation schemes like PAM, for example), and to enhance link mechanisms by employing optical chip-to-chip links or using techniques like pre- and de-emphasis. He presented a picture of the technology deployment ecosystem and said Agilent is able to test all the interfaces at the physical layer and the interfaces of many edge devices at the protocol layer.

Based on exhibits on the show floor, test-and-measurement companies are well prepared to help the designers that Intel’s Eul was addressing in his keynote. Agilent, for example, demonstrated a new bit-error-ratio tester that can operate to 32 Gb/s as well as a 35/50-GHz time-domain reflectometry and transmission module plus software that optimizes multigigabit-per-second chip-to-chip links. ANSYS debuted new functionality for its electromagnetic simulation suite for the design of high-speed printed circuit boards and IC packages. Tektronix highlighted PCI Express 3 compliance, DDR4 automation support, and MIPI M-PHY receiver testing. Teledyne LeCroy demonstrated a 100-GHz real-time oscilloscope and highlighted a protocol analyzer and exerciser platform for testing SuperSpeed USB 10-Gb/s systems. Anritsu showcased BER, emphasis, and jitter measurements and also employed a vector network analyzer demonstration to highlight the importance of simulation-measurement correspondence.

Eul of Intel concluded his keynote by saying, “What you do with the transistors is where it all starts.” 

The only thing he left unmentioned is the importance of the test-and-measurement equipment and simulation and test software that ensure your designs really do deliver that user experience.