Feature Articles
On the Radio
Agilent’s Approach to RFIC
It’s hard to tell if it’s a businessperson’s dream or nightmare market. Imagine a large market, a huge market, a market that spans the world. A market that starts with a device and spawns an entire ecosystem of tools, services, and accessories. A market where the technology starts out complex and just gets harder from there, making it difficult to enter but helping to keep interlopers out. A market where competition is fierce and windows of opportunity are tiny. And where the life of a given product is short and must be immediately followed up with the next version. Where prices need to be low, performance high, and battery life long. And where more types of technology need to play nicely together in a smaller space than in any other application. And where the device itself has to play nicely with its neighbors, like the TV, radio, or cockpit controls. Read More
Bringing Together Two Points of View
He had been following this guy for about five miles, and his legs were starting to get tired. But he couldn’t let that distract him; if he were noticed now, it would blow the entire investigation. Hanging back just a bit in the shadows, he gave up some distance and then started forward again. But, from around the corner, a policeman stepped in front of him and in a slightly suspicious, insinuating tone, asked, “Est-ce que je vous pourrais aider, peut-être?”
Reflexively, he pulled out a badge and said, “Ik ben rechercheur met…” and then realized that this wasn’t going to work. He wasn’t in Flanders anymore; he had crossed into Wallonia. And even though “rechercheur” came from French, it would carry implications more of research than detective work, and, even if understood, his Walloon counterpart wouldn’t be willing to acknowledge any such understanding, given its contamination by Dut… er… Flemish usage.
Keeping Us in Stitches. Or Out.
Or, Everything I Needed To Know About Double-Patterning I Learned In Kindergarten
Chopping wood may be character building, but it takes time. Each chop takes a bit more of the wood away until you finally break through. When you’ve got a lot of wood to chop, getting it done faster is a good thing, so you increase your pace. But even the burliest lumberjack can go only so fast; if you want to go faster, you get two lumberjacks, one on each side, and have them interleave chops.
Moving from the time domain into the space domain, double-patterning has the same role for getting around pesky resolution limits when trying to expose small features. If things are too close together to resolve, you break them apart more or less into even and odd features and expose the even ones on one mask and the odd ones on the other. In theory, each mask will have double the spacing, making resolution easier, and, assuming your alignment is good when applying the second mask, you end up cheating the limits. Simple. In theory.
Analog Audacity
Triad Offers Configurable Analog Arrays
Some dreams die hard. While digital FPGAs, structured ASICs/gate arrays, and other such configurable chips are commonplace, an analog equivalent remains a vision as yet unrealized to the same extent. Sure, there have been attempts – Actel has devices on the market, although the content is primarily digital; Lattice even tried once upon a time, but without leaving a clear mark. Standard FPGAs have increased their analog content with high-speed I/O circuitry, but that’s all carefully hand-crafted, with a narrowly controlled range of options from which the user can choose.
Analog has a number of things working against it when it comes to programmable arrays of any sort. The mix of what to put on there is a good start: you can’t just assemble transistors and allow them to be connected by the user; you’d never get the required performance. So you have to build higher-level blocks – and then, which ones and how many of each? Another challenge is the variability of leading-edge process nodes – it plays havoc with analog; such processes lend themselves much more to tender loving manual design. Letting an end user configure an array on such a process just feels like folly.
Package Creep
It seems so often that, here, in this space, we end up reflecting: “It used to be so easy.” Taking yet another example, once upon a time, you had packaging engineers – mechanical engineering types – who took care of all the packaging stuff. They told you how big to make your bonding pads, and that was about it. Oh, yeah, and the pesky ESD stuff. (Does it have to be all the way to 2000 V? Can we change the model so it’s easier?) The mechanical engineers lived off someplace different, and most electrical engineers never had to talk to them. It used to be so easy.
Life got a bit more complicated with the advent of flip-chip allowing bumps in an array instead of just the periphery. But things are getting even more interesting these days. TSV and other technologies are allowing 3D stacking of dice, and one immediate impact is that we don’t need as many strong drivers on the chips. It also provides more degrees of routing freedom, which is the point of the Pathfinding project.
2009 Wrap Up
As the din of destruction diminishes, we sit tight and wait. And listen. Are we hearing or hallucinating? The dissonant disquiet decrescendos into silence, punctuated by the occasional percussive surrender of a barely-balanced brick or toppling timber.
Convinced that at least our sense of sound is intact, we move on to others. Move a finger: feel anything? Yes. Move all fingers: contact? Yes. Move toes. Shift ever so slightly. Everything is still working.
Raise our head. Anything in the way? No… lift up and… blink… blink… blink… dust and detritus gradually come into focus as our pupils narrow to avoid overloading the visual, which clearly is also still working.
Honey, We No Longer Need to Shrink Raquel Welch
So much confusion is caused by the word "law". At its simplest a law is a man-made rule that humans have to obey or suffer sanctions. Laws, in this sense, may be arrived at democratically or laid down by a leader and accepted by his subjects. The confusion begins when a set of observations of the natural world, such as how solid bodies behave in motion or at rest, are described, and this description becomes labeled as a law. Star Trek's Scotty says, “You cannae change the laws of physics,” which suggests that these laws are immutable instead of descriptive. (Although calling Darwin's Theory the Law of Evolution would mean that creationists can no longer try the loophole, “Evolution is only a theory.”)
Moore's Law perhaps should have been Moore's Theory or, even more carefully, Moore’s Hypothesis. Just to refresh our memory, what Gordon Moore initially said, in 1965, was that the number of components on a chip would double every year. This has been revised a little, and it is now generally accepted that we are looking at doubling at around every 18 months to two years. When Moore formulated the law, there were no microprocessors, but it is frequently cited as a measure of the way that processing power increases.
Synthesizing a New Category
Oasys Turns Synthesis Upside Down
It started more or less like any typical press briefing. OK, slightly less typical because we were live in a conference room instead of doing things by conference call. But that’s not unheard of; it’s just hard to do on a regular basis in these far-flung times.
I was there with Oasys’s Sanjiv Kaul and Paul van Besouw. And as the conversation got started, Paul launched something on his laptop, and we continued the conversation for a few minutes.
I honestly don’t remember how many minutes it was, but it wasn’t a lot. And we went back to Paul’s computer and the thing he had started was complete.
It turns out that the thing he had started was synthesis of a 6-million-gate design using their RealTime Designer tool. About 300,000 lines of RTL code. Not the biggest design in the world, but far from a trivial demo design. And it finished in those few minutes. On his laptop.
Hardware Design Management Heats Up
Old-School Meets Open Source
When you go to one of the major shows like DAC, you expect to pick up on whatever the latest buzz is. There’s always a topic or two that is on the tip of everyone’s lips, the subject of whispers and gossip and speculation, involving contestants in a “who-can-outshout or -out-outrageous the other guy” competition in a shameless attempt to garner our uninterrupted gaze.
And, in any given year, you can probably guess what the flavors of the year are likely to be. Generally they are a) something completely new, b) a radical improvement in performance of something old, or c) something that’s always been around that for some reason gets elevated to exalted status, like AMS.
Under this top level, things pretty much bubble along, with a mix of obvious things vying for the few remaining breaths of oxygen in the exhibit hall.