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Analog & Digital Chips On The Same Silicon
jukal writes "Forbes.com writes: "Intel Corp. Monday announced plans to put some functions of analog and digital chips onto the same piece of silicon, its latest push into the communications semiconductor industry.", "which will be available early in 2004, could lead to a single-chip hand-held device that offers cellular phone, wireless-data-network and other connection services.", so, I quess this will be a competitor to the Texas Instruments' OMAP chip?"
As if we need even smaller cell phones. Oh I can't wait for the day when I lose my cell phone in my EAR.
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
How many reports of "signle chip solutions" are we gonna hear before we really start seeing things happen? I see alot of "your toaster, car, girlfriend cell phone PDA and HDTV will all be pumped right into your retina" and so far I still have to carry about four "portable" (yeah sure, on their own they are, but not all together) pieces of crap.... Enough with the talk, make with the damn gadgets!
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Does this mean mobile phones will get smaller? I have enough problems with the nokia 8310 being to small, any smaller and it starts getting unusable. I'm not old though, or technology challenged, just a average 24 year old who finds 8310s to small!
On the other hand, if theres less space taken by the electronics then you can have a bigger battery and more talk time.
I guess even more features are being packed into ever smaller spaces.... is nothing new?
A large section of embedded IC's have digital & analog on one chip. This has been done for years, just beacuse Intel are now doing it does n't make it news.
I want a phone smaller than my already tiny Sanyo 6200 (Sprint Dual band)
;P
Or, even better, a phone the same size, but with a bigger screen and battery.
Seriously, this phone is bad ass, and the "smallest dual-band phone in North America"
It has a picture of my girlfriend on it
Single chip A and D have been available for at least 20 years. Hobbyists could buy single chip DVM kits and virtually ALL modems nowadays are Mixed A and D DSP chips.
Well, I guess it means after 20 years (or so), finally a serious contender to the analog/digital king: the SID chip.
I wonder if it will have a life span as long as the SID...
The point of integrating the analog and digital circuits onto one chip is not just to shrink the size of the device. It'll make a more feature-rich device cheaper, more realiable, and should result in better battery life.
This is interesting for cell phones, but it has far more interesting possibilities in the general realm of analog and digital circuit integration.
Maybe its new for this application, but hybrid analog/digital chips have been around for a long time. Anybody ever hear of an analog-to-digital converter, or perhaps a digital-to-analog converter?
For that matter, inkjet printheads have quite a bit of both analog and digital circuitry on them, and they are made out of a single silicon die.
This is like cats and dogs coexisting peacefully-
Its total anarchy!
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
wake up
old news Intel have been pimping this ever since they got the StrongARM to try and win TI customers
yawn....
This means that instead of two-chips cellular will have single-chip celluar!
That's a huge advance!
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
RIAA Spokeswoman Hillary Rosen immedietly began a legal action to block this technology. "It would allow for the creation of Analog to digital and digital to Analog translation devices! It must be stopped. All industry must bow before RIAA profits! All technology that can be used to pirate music must be destroyed! Kill them! Hang them all!"
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
As ambitious as this effort is, there are significant barriers to getting it to work properly.
First off, analog and digital go hand in hand. All digital circuits are essentially analog circuits operating in a non-linear range. However, high-frequency analog circuitry is particularly problematic. Even basic structures such as phase locked loops and analog-to-digital converters can generate a lot of on-chip noise, both in the silicon substrate itself and through parasitic coupling above it. For basic PLLs, you need a good 50-100 microns of space between it and the nearest logic gate. Higher-speed cores will require structures like isolation tubs and additional spacing, and will significantly hamper placement and routing of the remaining circuitry. In other words, it is very easy to run out of die space and/or introduce signal integrity problems.
Speaking of signal integrity problems, the smaller geometry ICs (0.18um feature size and below) are having their signal integrity problems get worse and worse. Noise, delay, and wire melt are common problems that need repair in the digital circuitry, and noise margins are getting razor thin as it is. Power distribution is also going to be a nightmare, considering that every analog block will need its own power, probably multiple FC lands per block. The thing is, the CAD tools aren't there yet. Chips are still taped out with marginal signal integrity problems despite "simulating ok". Mind you, the analog portions are given a wide berth as I mentioned above, but who knows if they've fully covered this in the CAD tools or in the formulation of the design methodology. Lots of test vehicle chips will be needed.
Also, integrating passives can be precarious at best. Chips can have elements such as inductors and capacitors, but they're not area efficient at all, and you'll need external passive components anyway. And if you want power regulation for charging functions and battery regulation, fuggeddaboudit. These structures are particularly area inefficient. I don't think that this is what they're trying to do, but if you think we'll have literally everything integrated onto one chip, it won't happen.
I also have very little faith in the process technologies. If you look at some of the problems that 0.13um manufacturing has had with via voids and low-k dielectric brittleness that have been shown in the trade journals lately, I'd be very nervous with releasing something like this with just anyone's process. TI seems to be better for manufacturability, but TSMC or UMC? Don't count on it - yet. To accommodate the highly integrated nature of this device, they need a small process technology with very rigorous manufacturing capabilities to avoid some of these problems.
Finally, integrating analog RF and digital requires advanced packaging technologies. If I've got the output to an antenna block in my chip package, how do I get it out? Most likely, this would go into a flip-chip package to accommodate the high integrated nature of this. Well, the flip-chip redistribution layer, the package substrate, and the surrounding pins will all have to be very carefully designed so that the RF signal will be sufficiently isolated. On RF-only chips, this isn't a problem. Heck, they have fully-integrated Bluetooth chips. But Bluetooth only has enough power to reach 30 meters. We're talking a signal that has to reach several kilometers here. That's a difference. It's doable, but it is just another big constraint on the design.
Can they do it? I think they *might* be able to, but not without significant design effort. Personally, I think they're better off going with a multi-die package and leaving the RF block as a die right beside the other, and specially route through the substrate with its own power. Integrated doesn't always have to mean "everything on one chip". Just like gift wrapping multiple presents in the same wrapper, I think this would be a better way to go for this effort, and will deliver fruit MUCH faster than what I believe they're implying in the article.
One more thing from Neuromancer that is edging towards reality.
so, I quess this will be a competitor to the Texas Instruments' OMAP chip?
;)
Quess again! Lets start running these stories through a spell-checker before we promote them to the front page.
On a related note, this story is a little interesting, but there isn't a lot of meat to grab onto, IMHO. Yay! We can have digital and analog circuits on the same chip. Actually, I'm a little surprised that wasn't being done already if it is that much of an advantage.
Most Bluetooth vendors have already developped and are in production with 'single' chip designs that incorporate both the digital baseband with the analog radio and all the 'glue logic' in between. This isn't really news on the Analog-Digital single chip designs, but more for the Analog-digital cellular single chip designs.
Cellular chipsets require very precise parts and separate the analog from the digital for good reasons - noise, crosstalk, coupling, etc. This is a good step forward for wireless design as a whole.
ftp://download.intel.com/labs/eml/download/EML_rad io.pdf
Well, the mixed AD chip is almost irrelevant as far as size is concerned. Signal wavelength considerations are important, which determine the minimum length of copper connections.
Also lot of the space is taken up by the electromechanical filter (I think they are called ceramic oscillators, but I cannot be sure), which is basically just two comb-like structures of copper that are unconnected. Signals pass between each part by mechanical vibration)
I miss my rubber keyboard.(Homepage)
Germanium is an element. A Geranium is a plant. It pisses me off supposedly intelligent people refer to "Silicon-Geranium" fab methods.
Be sure to fertilise that chip.
- Adam
I know people who have, for all their life, spelled it quess because they thought it was actually spelled that way. Weird...
Four.5 years ago I was on contract at Credence. They make machines to test semiconductors.
.. that is, "mixed signal" was explained to me as analog & digital on the same chip.
... an eon in Silicon Valley time. That was around the time of the 1997 Asian Tiger meltdown (remember that?).
One of their machines was for "mixed signal" testing applications
4.5 years ago
- David
This will NOT be a competitor to OMAP. OMAP is a chip that contains an ARM925T RISC, C55x DSP, and just about every peripheral you can think of (USB, MMC, Memory Stick, UART, Bluetooth, etc).
TI is planning on producing a chip that combines into a single chip the software, baseband technology, applications processing, power management, radio frequency and embedded memory that typically require separate processors.
There is also a NYT Article.
I have 8" long hands so the nokia doesn't feel THAT small, but I guess for the people with larger hands then it is too small.
I was working on analog/digital chips at IBM over 2 years ago. This is reeaally old. WHy is this news?
People have been doing this for years. I have been designing analog circuits that went on chips with lots of digital for the last four years now. Things like you cable modem, video encoders/decoders (in TVs, game consoles, video cards, etc), sattelite set top boxes, ethernet cards, and many more all have chips with analog and digital on the same chip.
For years now you can ge processor cores from MIPS, ARM, Motorola, IBM, and others to integrate into your chips. Many of these go into chips with anaog circuts as well. The only new part of this is tha no one has used it with an x86 core from intel. (Although I think people have used x86 cores from other companies. National Semiconductor sells more 486s now than Intel because they are still popular in embedded markets.) The thing is that these cores are usually small and low power.
And an other thing. Of course the analog circuits don't benifit from Moore's law like digital does!!!! Anybody with any knowledge of analog knows this. As the process shrinks, the analog gets harder. That's why the high performance analog chips use specialty processes. The drive to go to a regular digital porcess for the analog is that it is cheap, but when the digital benifits from a shrink, the analog usually suffers.
Anyway the ONLY reason this is news is that the reporter gets to mention Intel. I haven't checked the stock price, but maybe they were hoping for a little bump over this.
When I was a co-op at TI (custom DSP group) in 1992, we had a mixed signal DSP with a c10 core (25% of chip), a 12-bit A-D converter (25% of chip) and a big sea of analog circuitry to combine several functions inside a hard drive into one chip.
Since then, TI has published a library of cores and analog circuitry (including antennaes, A/D, D/A, etc.) that can be mixed and matched as needed for your custom DSP system.
This is possibly new and shiny because Intel finally decided to get involved in cell phones. Nothing else about the article is cutting edge or even slightly revolutionary.
Regards,
Ross
For one half of the world, 'chips' are 'crisps', in other words sliced potatoes fried till they get hard and seasoned with spices, salt, peper, onions, or whatever. (I mean this) For another half of the world (not necessarily mutually exclusive), chips are 'frenched fried potatoes', in other words 'fritten met frikandel en pikkels', in yet other words you cut them in prisms about 6mm x 6mm x the length of the potato, then you bake them twice in 180 C animal fat and serve them with mayo. Call them ASICs or ICs or whatever the correct term is for what you vaguely meant, for heaven's sake ! We're nerds, we're not Joe Mainstream.
What's significant about SiGe and heterojunctions is that current Si technology is homojunction with a fixed, indirect bandgap (the latter being why there are no Si electro-optic devices like LEDs. Heterojunctions allow you to tune the bandgap and even create direct gap devices (which LED/Laser consistuents GaAs, GaInP, GaP, AlGaAs, et al., are) out of indirect gap elements. This throws in an additional set of parameters into the circuit design mix that allows traditional limits on carrier mobility, intrinsic carrier concentrations and other basic device parameters to be thrown out the window. This completely changes both the upper bounds of performance and potentially even basic device operating modes. Many of the "tricks" from the GaAs world become available to "mere mortals of the commercial Si world" such as HBTs, HEMTs, LEDs, EOs, et al.
Now one of the largest Si manufacturers has seen the economics as workable for general purpose uses. That is profound because for >30 years, GaAs has never gotten there beyond its very small niches, largely due to economics.
As mentioned, mixed signal devices have been around for some time (every cellphone has a mixed signal IC). Combining digital computing with analog circuitry has often required trading performance on one or the other - often what makes good digital gates MOS devices and processing isn't optimal for analog circuits which is best done in bipolar. HBTs are a special high-performance bipolar technology - an analog designer's dream, yet all the VLSI digital can be on-chip without compromise!
The TI OMAP comparison is completely out in left field as others have mentioned. Irrelevant.
JSki
Of course they invented mixed signal, just like Microsoft invented linked lists last year.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We can do most, if not all, the analog and digital functions with pre-existing technology. Heck, I prefer seperate modules so that if one part goes, the other can take over, or work indepedant from each other.
This just sounds like the ussual press release BS that doesn't matter to anyone.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Thank you for explaining the SiGe heterojunction advance! Just wish I could have given you some of the mod points that went toward my post.
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The OMAP chip integrates a DSP and an ARM processor. There is no analog circuitry in the OMAP. I haven't read the intel article, but my guess is they are talking about integrating true analog components onto a chip such as simple mixers and VCO's. These would serve to perform a final downconvert for the incoming signal which would then be fed into an on chip A/D so the information could pass to the digital circuitry. This would be a fixed architecture targetted to a specific comm standard. There are already some chips that have both digital and analog components integrated onto the same wafer. The Programmable System on a Chip (PSOC) line from Cypress Semiconductor allows for programmable digital and analog blocks on one chip giving you the core of a CPLD and the ability to graft on custom filters and amps (abliet simple ones) and varying A/D's and DACS all on the same piece of silicon. That can mean some truely usefull real estate savings when laying out your design.
I did my Masters' thesis on an analog amplified system using a standard CMOS process. They're just transistors. Nothing magical here.
--Blair
The fastest x86 processor just got faster - Built on .13-micron technology
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extentions 2
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It's Chipii.
j/k.
These things have been around for years.
"Twenty-five signatures turns the most frightful stupidity into an opinion" -Kirkegaard
http://www.commsdesign.com/design_center/opticalne tworking/news/OEG20020915S0001
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The interesting thing about the article is that Intel is now using SiGe bipolar devices as well as CMOS FETs in their mixed-signal designs. The author doesn't seem to understand the technology well enough to understand that this is the key point. It's a technology achievement for Intel, not a design achievement. People have been doing mixed-signal designs for quite some time now.
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