System Integration Leads to MegaFunction Gadgets

nanotrends writes "The IEEE Spectrum is running a piece entitled 'Moore's Law Meets Its Match', about the system-on-package (SOP) approach to technology. The (SOP) approach combines Integrated Circuits (ICs) with micrometer-scale thin-film versions of discrete components, and it embeds everything in a new type of package so small that eventually handhelds will become anything from multi-to megafunction devices. This integration is actually developing at a rate faster than Moore's law." From the article: "SOP technology represents a radically different approach to systems. It shrinks bulky circuit boards with their many components and makes them nearly disappear. In effect, SOP sets up a new law for system integration. It holds that as the components shrink and the boards all but disappear, the component density will double every year or so, and the number of system functions in an SOP package will increase in the same proportion."

Comments

This is new?

[mikalveli]

Hustler has been talking about MegaFunction gadgets for years.

Re:Integate CPU + DRAM + Flash

[MoxFulder]

Eh... what??? It's already been done, been available for years. Nearly all the popular PIC microcontrollers and the AVR microcontrollers have Flash, CPU, and static RAM on chip.

Granted, those are 8-bit processors with no more than 64k or so of Flash, and no more than a few Kb of SRAM, but they're surprisingly powerful and useful. You can get 'em in clock rates of 50 MHz or more and all kinds of nifty on-chip peripherals are available... my favorites are the on-chip ADC and USB controllers! Plus the whole thing can be had for about $3, and Microchip (which makes the PIC) is *amazingly* generous in giving away free samples to anyone who asks (I've gotten so many of them I actually feel a bit guilty!).

You *ARE* correct that having external address and data lines does take up a lot of pins on a microprocessor. Having the memory onboard with a microcontroller is very nice, greatly reduces pin count. My favorite AVR microcontroller is available in a 28-pin DIP package, which is great for prototyping, and up to 25 of those pins can be used for general purpose digital I/O. Handy that!

Frankly, I don't see a great advantage to combining something like a 32-bit ARM CPU with a few megs of Flash and SDRAM in one package. The development of those products is inevitably more expensive and complex than for simpler 8-bit embedded systems. And as you say, different products are required to produce them. Most of the integrated applications seem to go in a slightly different direction: for example, many companies today sell a wireless-router-on-a-chip which combines a MIPS or ARM CPU, ethernet switch, DRAM controller, and 802.11g transceiver. Just add Flash, DRAM, and baseband wireless :-)