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Analog & Digital Chips On The Same Silicon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the put-'em-together dept.

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?"

3 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Not new, it's called Mixed signal. by msgmonkey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Not new, it's called Mixed signal. by jaoswald · · Score: 5, Informative

      You are completely right about mixed signal chips being a reality for a long time: you don't need to look any further than a video card in your computer to see that. Intel mentions "silicon radio" as if it is a new idea, but a company already exists called Cambridge Silicon Radio, so you can see it isn't just Intel in this business.

      I have a feeling that something important is being left out of this article. If you look at the original press release you see that it is a total mishmash of different Intel developments. The poor journalist was stuck trying to find a lead in this story (other than "Intel has bunches o' innovation") and zeroed in on the part that mentioned Moore's law, which he had heard before.

      The most interesting part that I see is the tunable laser using silicon photonics. Si has an indirect band-gap, which makes it not very good for making lasers and optical devices. That could be big news.

  2. Re:This is new? by jaoswald · · Score: 4, Informative

    An A-D converter is not necessarily a truly hybrid device. The point is that there are transistors that are good for producing gain, possibly at high frequencies. Those make up what are generically called "linear" chips. Mostly op-amps and so on.
    These tend to be bipolar junction transistors or related technologies. The key thing is that they tend to pass current all the time.

    Then, there are transistors which are good for switching, for creating logic gates & CPU logic. These tend to be CMOS field-effect transistors which are designed to only pass current when they are switching, in order to reduce power consumption so that you can raise the clock rate to obscene levels. However, logic gates are ideally non-linear: either on or off, with nothing in between.

    The problem is that these technologies are differently optimized, and aren't naturally compatible. Coming up with a process that can produce nice linear transistors along with high-performance logic gates is tough. You can also try to approach it from the other end: come up with some kind of circuit which can make nicer amplifiers out of lousy transistors.

    That's what makes true mixed-signal chips difficult: you either give up linear behavior, or increase current draw, or you give up the gate density and clock performance.