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FinFET Design Challenges Exposed!

FinFET Design Challenges Exposed!
by Daniel Nenni on 04-07-2013 at 6:00 pm
Categories: Foundries, TSMC

The first mention of FinFETs appeared on SemiWiki after the ISSCC conference in 2011. Dr. Jack Sun, TSMC Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer, spoke about the power crisis the semiconductor industry is facing and FinFETs was one of the promising technologies that could help us. Since then, we have posted 100+ related articles with FinFET being the top trending term for search engine traffic coming to SemiWiki in 2012. That is why Dr Chenming Hu, the father of FinFETs, is the covetedKaufman Award winner this year and why I agreed to keynote FinFET day at the EDPS Conference in Monterey this month. They should call them FunFETs because we are certainly having a good time!

Recently I was invited to an informal back yard BBQ with a group of layout people who are working on FinFET test chips. Layout people are a different breed for sure but you will not meet a harder working group in the semiconductor ecosystem, believe it. And FinFETs are not making their life any easier!

My mother was very analytical, a natural born engineer. Unfortunately, in the 1950’s women weren’t encouraged to work outside the home much less become engineers but she did anyway and ended up being a draftsperson working on the Apollo Space program. I remember getting the VIP treatment as a kid at her work place and noticing that the clear majority of her coworkers were women, except management of course.

It was deja vu all over again when I worked with layout groups in Silicon Valley in the early 1980’s. Mostly women, none of which had engineering degrees but, like my dear mother, were engineers at heart and very good at what they did. 30 years later quite a bit has changed with layout groups and tools given that the job is much more difficult with all of the design and manufacturing advances we have seen over the years.

One of the things that has NOT changed however is the Design Rule Manuals (DRMs). They are still the center of the layout universe, they are still in paper or PDF form, and they are a growing problem for layout people. Process technologies are coming at them faster every year. Design rules are much more complicated and change more frequently during the “maturing” period. DRMs are much more cryptic and tape out schedules are staying the same. Clearly DRMs are going to have to change if we are going to continue down this path otherwise schedules will slip, mistakes will be made, layout people will spontaneously combust, not a pretty picture believe me. Adding layout head count will not help either since it takes years to master leading edge layout. In fact that is what has saved us thus far, the depth of experience the average layout person has today.

The change that is coming, the change that has to come, is with the DRMs. As a communication tool between the foundries and the fabless semiconductor companies it is failing. We need to provide the information REQUIRED to efficiently and effectively layout modern semiconductor devices. What we need is an Interactive Design Rule Manual that brings design rules to life! Sound reasonable?

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A Non Deterministic Timing Problem

A Non Deterministic Timing Problem
by Luke Miller on 04-07-2013 at 2:00 pm
Categories: FPGA, Xilinx

When I was not messing around with FPGA Research and Development, or Algorithms, I was often called into the lab or field and presented this type of scenario… Most of the time, the fix was the same…

At least a few times a year, I’d get the call. Sometimes a panic in the voice, or sometimes defeat. And who wouldn’t be defeated? After all, the FPGA design worked in PowerPoint :p and in ModelSim. The designers scrubbed and polished all the timing warnings and it was go time, excitement was in the air. The bosses were happy as earned value was thru the roof and believed that this FPGA was only going to be routed once! Then the worst case scenario was happening. “A Non Deterministic Timing Problem”… The panic would get so bad that the engineers would start using the ‘R’ word ‘RANDOM’, I wanted to patent their RANDOM design and just retire, but then I recalled the company was paying me to solve this problem.

So standing usually in front of some VME chassis, I would start asking a series of questions, like who did your hair? No, seriously I use humor to diffuse the much stressed, tired, cranky managers and engineers. Sometimes it even worked. I would ask:

  • After a power cycle or cold start what happens?
  • Has this problem always presented this way, i.e. , software change (hey, got to blame the software guys…)
  • How long into the ‘run’ before the problem occurs?
  • Is it repeatable? What has changed?
  • Was the top level simulated?
  • How many clock domains does the FPGA have?
  • Did you use Asynchronous FIFOs to cross those domains and use either an EMPTY FLAG or the like to push/pull data?

Believe it or not, those two last questions have solved most of the hard FPGA system integration type questions over my career. It was sometimes due to a fancy or green FPGA designer thinking he could design around the clock boundaries and not use asynchronous FIFOs. Other times it was the assumption on data rates. The designer thought that the FIFO would never go empty so why look. A great FPGA designer will always look at the data valid and empty flags. If the interface rates change, your design is robust enough to handle them without an FPGA re-spin.

With FPGA designs having easily 10 plus clock domains, it is ever important to pay attention and design ahead the FPGA clocking architecture. Use VISIO or a notebook, the point is put the keyboard down and prove to yourselves how you are going to synchronize all the data within that FPGA. This work lends to the old adage, ‘Ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’.

Luke Miller

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GSA Silicon Summit: More than Moore

GSA Silicon Summit: More than Moore
by Paul McLellan on 04-05-2013 at 2:32 pm
Categories: Global Semiconductor Alliance, Semiconductor Services

The theme of this year’s GSA Silicon Summit is More than Moore. This has become a sort of catchall phrase for technologies other than simply moving to the next process node. The summit is on April 18th at the computer history museum (1401 Shoreline Blvd). Registration takes place at 9am and the actual sessions start at 9.45am. There are three panel sessions during the day and lunch is provided.

The first session, from 10-11am, introduced and moderated by Dan Rabinovitsj of Qualcomm, is on Disruptive Innovation — Enabling Technology for the Connected World of Tomorrow. The panelists are Jaga Jagannathan of IBM, Kiavan Karimi from Freescale, Mark Miscione of Peregrine, Naveed Sherwani of OpenSilicon and Ely Tsern of Rambus.

With the industry’s long-term focus on scaling now joined by functional diversification, this session will open with an overview on how More than Moore is enabling the connected landscape of today and shaping the future of tomorrow. The panel will then discuss current and emerging applications that continue to drive the More than Moore adoption as well as the process technologies enabling this development.

The second session, from 11.15am to 12.15pm, introduced and moderated by Ed Sperling is on How More than Moore Impacts the Internet of Things. On the panel are Jack Guedj of Tensilica (or maybe Cadence by then), John Heinlein of ARM, Kamran Izadi of Cisco and Oleg Logvinov from ST.

From the Swarm Lab to the smart bulb, the Internet of Things is showing evidence of becoming a reality. However today’s productivity trails what is needed to make the Internet of Things a truly ubiquitous system, and at the heart of the matter is developing the low power, mixed-signal technology that will enable chips and systems to communicate to the real world with minimal or without battery power. This session will open with an overview on where the industry stands in applying the concept of More than Moore to drive the Internet of Things. The panel will assess the industry requirements, obstacles, and advancements in developing the technology required to make the Internet of Things a reality.

After lunch is a third session, from 1.15-2.15pm, introduced and moderated by Bruce Kleinman of GlobalFoundries on Integration Challenges and Opportunities. The panellists are Jim Aralis of Microsemi, Misha Burich from Altera, William Chen from ASE, Steve Longoria of Soitec and Robert Rogenmoser of SuVolta.

Furthering the advancement of More than Moore involves unifying silicon technologies with novel integration concepts; application software convergence; and new supply chain business models. This session will open with an overview identifying the key industry trends, challenges and opportunities to realize higher density, greater functional performance and boosted power for ICs.
The panel will then discuss possible collaborative solutions to the challenges of integration and its impact on business market growth and investment.

The meeting wraps up at 2.30pm after some closing remarks. The full agenda with more detailed bios of the speakers is here with a link to the registration page. If you are a GSA member it is free, otherwise $50.

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Mentor Graphics User2User Conference

Mentor Graphics User2User Conference
by glforte on 04-05-2013 at 1:06 pm
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA


April 25, 2013, San Jose, CA
Click here to register.

Come hear Mentor Graphics CEO, Wally Rhines, 2013 Kaufman Award Winner,Chenming Hu, and Xilinx Senior VP,Victor Peng, at the User2User Conference in San Jose.

KEYNOTES
Organizing by Design
9:00am – 9:50am
Walden C. Rhines | CEO & Chairman | Mentor Graphics
Winning products are rarely the result of optimizing only one aspect of a design. Innovators generate success because they find ways to cross organizational and functional boundaries to optimize a product in multiple disciplines. Mature companies try to solve this problem by creating cross-disciplinary teams while startup companies do it naturally due to lack of enough resources to allow specialization. Meanwhile, products targeted at customers in different disciplines rarely appeal to more than one. Dr. Rhines has compiled data on cross-disciplinary product successes including attempts by companies to create products for hardware/software co-design, mechanical/electrical design integration and many more. He has identified successes and categorized the ways that companies have (rarely) achieved multi-disciplinary product optimization. He will use these examples to generate some guidelines for companies of all sizes to achieve product development success.

The New Era of Heterogeneous Architectures and Integration Technologies
10:00am – 10:50am
Victor Peng | Senior VP of Programmable Platform Group | Xilinx
Since the first integrated circuit was demonstrated in 1959, transistor density has increased by a factor of a billion and in the process has changed the world. However, despite the integration levels possible at advanced nodes like 28nm, the vast majority of high performance analog and high density memory chips have been and continue to be built with technologies distinct from high performance digital chips due to conflicting technology requirements. Another megatrend is the explosion in the cost of developing ICs in advanced nodes while the cost reduction benefit from moving to an advanced node has been disappearing. In this new era of integrated circuits the next wave of innovation will come in the form of heterogeneous architectures and products realized with 3D IC integration technologies. This talk will describe how Xilinx is enabling heterogeneous architectures and products as well as the underlying technologies required to realize them.

FinFET is a Beginning
1:00pm – 1:50pm
Dr. Chenming Hu | TSMC Chair Professor of Graduate School | Univ. of California, Berkeley
FinFET overcomes the impending show stopper that device physics imposes. The ultra-thin-body concept, which FinFET embodies, may lead to more new structures and materials research directions that can give relief for other future show stoppers such as the high cost of scaling by lithography. Dr. Hu is the 2013Kaufman Award winner for distinguished contributions to EDA.

TECHNICAL SESSIONS
Practical Tips to Increase Productivity and Communication with Calibre
11:00am – 11:30am
Joseph Davis | Marketing Director | Mentor Graphics
Just running physical or electrical verification is only part of the battle of getting your chip to Tape-out. We will show practical applications of how to minimize your debug time, minimize manual steps, and improve communications between team members and with your foundry. These applications are appropriate for both custom and digital design flows and leverage the Calibre tool set that you already own.

Meeting the Turn-Around Time Challenges for Sign-Off Extraction
11:30am – 12:00pm
Carey Robertson | Product Marketing Director | Mentor Graphics
Achieving design closure is increasingly difficult with new manufacturing effects creating modeling challenges and driving the need for additional interconnect corners at advanced nodes. Most customers are not using Calibre for Sign-Off Extraction. xACT SOC will change that and this session will introduce how this solution can accurately model interconnect at all nodes as well as achieve performance and scalability that is unmatched by competitive offerings.

Custom Place and Route Layout Enhancement Using Calibre with Timing Verification
2:00pm – 2:40pm
Shobit Malik | Senior Member Technical Staff | GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Christian Hauf | MTS< Member of Technical Staff | GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Sriram MAdhavan | PMTS, Principal Member of Technical Staff | GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Ahmed Mohyeldin | MTS, Member of Technical Staff | GLOBALFOUNDRIES
James Paris | Technical Marketing Engineer | Mentor Graphics
At advanced process technology nodes, design for manufacturability techniques like redundant via insertion and via line end extensions are known to be critical for improved yield and reliability. For digital designs, the router is used to insert redundancy in terms of more vias, large metal area as well as metal enclosure without growing area to make a design manufacturable. Since a router’s primary goal is to place and route a design in a limited amount of space, it is limited in its capability to push the insertion of redundant geometries. Hence, we use a custom solution whose primary focus is to insert a maximum of redundant geometries to make a design more manufacturable. These geometries are added within existing open space without growing existing space or touching existing layout using internally developed tool Y.E.S (Yield Enhancement Suite).

Since Y.E.S is a post place and route enhancement, it restricted us from verifying the timing impact as these changes are done on layout outside of the router’s database. This restriction limited the application of Y.E.S in the digital world since a proper sign off process required timing validation for all layout changes or enhancements done.

In this presentation we share our approach to use Y.E.S (or a similar post layout optimization tool) with the ability to back annotate it’s layout changes into a router’s database. We discuss the flow used to do this back annotation and show as an example our implementation where we imported these layout changes into MilkyWay database.

Layout Dependent Effects: Checking Number of Fingers with a Calibre-Based Flow
2:50pm – 3:30pm
Bruce Leong | Principal Hardware Engineer | Oracle
Starting with the 28nm process node, physics plays an even more important role in device performance. Layout practices must be changed in order to match modeling. Among these issues is matching the exact number of fingers for a device in the layout as specified by the circuit designer in the schematic. A method is described using Calibre LVS, the Query Server, a netlist flattener, and RVE output to achieve this matching.

Design Reliability with Calibre Smart-Fill and PERC
3:40pm – 4:20pm
Muni Mohan | Engineering Manager | Broadcom
This presentation dwells on improving design reliability and yield models with Calibre SmartFill and Calibre® PERC™.
The complexity of advanced technologies drives new requirements for poly/OD and metal fill to solve critical manufacturing effects, and more importantly design yields. New methodologies were developed for 28nm designs using Calibre SmartFill to meet the new strict DFM requirements while reducing run time, file size and iterations.

Besides manufacturing process, electrical rule checks can also significantly impact design yields & reliability. Identifying incorrectly configured devices, multi-power domain transition guides, and floating (leaky) gates is critically important right from the circuit stage, well before physical layouts. Such early design consistency checks written with rules in Calibre® PERC™ help us catch design mistakes early on, and validate some of our high reliability design metrics.
Both Calibre Smart-Fill and Calibre® PERC™ were significantly and successfully deployed on our largest 28nm tapeout recently.

Synopsys Laker Custom Layout and Calibre Interfaces: Putting Calibre Confidence in Your Custom Design Flow
4:30pm – 5:10pm
Dave Reed | Director of Marketing | Synopsys
Joesph Davis | Marketing Director | Mentor Graphics
While every design must pass sign-off before going to the foundry, it is inefficient to wait until the very end of the design process to run the sign-off checks. For this reason, Calibre provides interfaces to both custom and digital design tools which enable engineers to check against the sign-off decks throughout the design process. Through close cooperation between Mentor and Synopsys, Synopsys Laker users can check with Calibre “on the fly” during design to speed creation of design-rule correct layout, including electrically-aware voltage-dependent DRC checks.

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For power and performance, Fins or BOXes?

For power and performance, Fins or BOXes?
by Beth Martin on 04-05-2013 at 12:50 pm
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA

I recently spoke to Arvind Narayanan, Product Marketing Manager for Mentor’s place and route division about emerging technology. This of course led to FinFETS, FDSOI, performance, power, and cost-benefit. The battle between FDSOI and FinFETs, said Narayanan, is going to be something to watch.

Both FDSOI and FinFET technologies provide better performance better power than bulk CMOS process. But, Narayanan asked, how do they compare with each other? Will FDSOI at 20nm bridge the 16nm finFET gap? Does finFET offer better cost benefits than FDSOI? The jury is still out on these questions, but he has some thoughts from a P&R perspective.

FDSOI technology relies on a thin layer of silicon that lays over a Buried Oxide (BOx). Transistors are built into the thin silicon layer, which is fully depleted of charges. Because the body is fully depleted the random dopant fluctuation that plagues bulk CMOS is reduced, thus improving performance even at lower VDD.
Some companies experimenting with FDSOI claim it has roughly 30% better performance, and lower power use, than bulk CMOS at 28nm.

28nm FDSOI is positioned as an alternate to bulk CMOS at 20nm. Narayanan said that if 28nm FDSOI delivers even half the power savings of bulk 20nm, it would be worth going that way to avoid dealing with the expense of double patterning (which is needed at 20nm). He pointed to another cost and scheduling benefit of 28nm FDSOI over 20nm FinFET from a P&R perspective; the FDSOI technology can use the conventional design flows and is completely transparent to the design tools.

FinFET also promises the sun and the moon in terms of power, performance, and area. FinFET devices have their channels turned on their edge with the gate wrapping around them. The term “fin” was coined by professors at Berkeley to define the thin silicon conducting channel. This unique configuration of a gate wrapped around the channel on all three sides delivers much better channel control and better resistance to dopant fluctuations. The innovative 3D structure and tighter channel control does result in improved area, better performance, and lower power than bulk CMOS. Narayanan said that the P&R flows should be minimally affected by the adoption of FinFET devices, but that FinFET is more difficult to design and manufacture. FinFET technology is in production at 22nm and is quickly ramping up for the next generations.

Narayanan can’t predict whether one of these two technologies will actually become dominant, or if they both find a niche and co-exist successfully. As always, he said, production volumes with determine the eventual winner.

You can find related articles on foundry-based IC design and manufacturing at www.mentor.com/solutions/foundry.

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RTL Restructuring

RTL Restructuring
by Daniel Payne on 04-04-2013 at 2:34 pm
Categories: EDA

Hierarchical IC design has been around since the dawn of electronics, and every SoC design today will use hierarchy for both the physical and logical descriptions. During the physical implementation of an SoC you will likely run into EDA tool limits that require a re-structure of the hierarchy. This re-partitioning will cause a change to the logical hierarchy and require some functional verification re-runs.

Continue reading “RTL Restructuring”

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Kathryn Kranen Wins UBM Lifetime Achievement Award 2013

Kathryn Kranen Wins UBM Lifetime Achievement Award 2013
by Paul McLellan on 04-03-2013 at 6:54 pm
Categories: EDA

UBM’s EETimes and EDN today announced Kathryn Kranen as the lifetime achievement award winner for this years ACE awards program. Kathryn, of course, is the CEO of Jasper (and is also currently the chairman of EDAC). Past winners exemplify the prestige and significance of the award. Since 2005 the award was given to Gordon Moore, then the Chairman emeritus of Intel, Wilf Corrigan, the Chairman of the board of LSI, Chung-Mou Chang the Founding Chairman of TSMC and Pasquale Pistorio the honorary Chairman of ST.

As CEO of Jasper, Kathryn has taken Jasper’s formal approaches to verification from a niche to a mainstream tool, managed to raise a round of funding in a very difficult environment, and put Jasper on the path to success.

Prior to Jasper, Kathryn was CEO of Verisity. While serving as CEO of Verisity Design, Kathryn and the team she built created an entirely new market in design verification. (Verisity later became a public company, and was the top-performing IPO of 2001, and subsequently was acquired by Cadence).

Prior to Verisity, Kathryn was vice president of North American sales at Quickturn Systems. She started her career as a design engineer at Rockwell International, and later joined Daisy Systems, an early EDA company. In 2009, Kathryn was named one of the EE Times’ Top 10 Women in Microelectronics. In 2012, she became a member of the board of trustees of the World Affairs Council or Northern California. She is currently serving her sixth term on the EDA Consortium board of directors, and was elected its chairperson in 2012. In 2005, Kathryn was recipient of the prestigious Marie R. Pistilli Women in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Achievement Award. She graduated summa cum laude from Texas A&M University with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering.

You may know that over on the DAC websitewe are running a “my DAC moment” series of stories. Kathryn has set the bar so high that it is hard to beat. She got engaged at DAC. Here is her story:My favorite DAC memory: Las Vegas in 1996. I was working for Quickturn at the time, and my now-husband Kevin worked for Synopsys. On the Wednesday morning of DAC, Kevin “popped the question”, and I eagerly accepted his proposal. We then both rushed off to our various DAC meetings.

I was mesmerized by my diamond engagement ring, sparkling under the huge lights in the exhibit hall. It was great fun to share our happy news with hundreds of EDA friends and co-workers. That evening, some friends and Kevin and I looked for an Elvis wedding chapel, thinking a fake wedding photo would be a fun way to spring the engagement news on our parents. Alas, all the Elvis wedding chapels were booked *on a Wednesday!

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Cell Level Reliability

Cell Level Reliability
by Paul McLellan on 04-03-2013 at 6:06 pm
Categories: EDA, IROC Technologies

I blogged last month about single event effects (SEE) where a semiconductor chip behaves incorrectly due to being hit by an ion or a neutron. Since we live on a radioactive planet and are bombarded by cosmic rays from space, this is a real problem, and it is getting worse at each process node. But just how big of a problem is it?


TFIT is a tool for evaluating all the cells in a cell-library, or the cells in a memory (or memory compiler) to calculate just how vulnerable they are to SEE causing a failure-in-time (FIT). It is very fast and the test results are within 15% for any type of cells. Within 15% of what? Within 15% of the actual value, which is determined by going to Los Alamos and putting real chips in a beam of neutrons so that damage is accelerated (or similar tests with alpha particles). IROC provide this as a service, btw, but that is a topic for another blog.


Since manufacturing silicon and bombarding it while designing a cell-library is not practical, TFIT is the way to get a “heat map” of where cells are vulnerable, in just the same way as we use circuit simulation to characterize the timing performance of the cells without having to manufacture them. Vulnerable transistors in the flop above, for example, are highlighted. The color corresponds to different linear energy transfer (LET) values. High energy particles only need to hit anywhere in the outer black rings, but, as you would intuitively expect, lower energy particles have to hit more directly as shown in red.


TFIT takes as input process response models (which today usually comes directly from the foundry since foundry A doesn’t really want foundry B analyzing their reliability data in detail). These are available for most recent processes in production at both TSMC and Global plus more generic models for older processes at 180nm, 90nm and 65nm. Along with that is iROC’s secondary particles nuclear database. The cell requires both layout and a spice netlist.


Memory analysis is a bit more complex since the bit cells are so small that a single particle can impact multiple bits, known as a multi-cell upset (MCU). The reliability data can then be used to decide on appropriate error correcting codes and how to organize the bits. Again, results are within 15%.

The tool can be run interactively on a single cell but it is often used in batch mode to characterize the vulnerability of an entire cell library. To analyze a single impact on an SRAM cell takes just a few seconds. The only comparable way to do analysis is to use TCAD which takes 4-8 hours. For more detail, which requires analyzing more than a single impact or a whole library, the TCAD approach is just not practical.

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Rare earth syndrome: PHY IP analogy

Rare earth syndrome: PHY IP analogy
by Eric Esteve on 04-03-2013 at 10:34 am
Categories: IP

If you ask to IP vendors selling functions, PHY or Controller, supporting Interface based protocols which part is the master piece, the controller IP only vendors will answer: certainly my digital block, look how complex it has to be to support the transport and logical part of the protocol! Just think about the PCI Express gen-3 specification, counting over 1000 pages… Obviously, the PHY IP vendor will claim to procure the essential piece: if the PHY does not work 100% according with the specification, nothing works! Now, would you ask me to answer this question, I will reply… by a question: do you know anything about the rare earth element case?


Rare earth metals are a set of seventeen chemical elements in the periodic table, specifically the fifteen lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium, which are used, even in very tiny amount, in almost every electronic systems, and most certainly in advanced systems, from iPhone to catalytic converters, from energy efficient lighting to weapons systems, and many more. To make a long story short, for short term consideration (I mean stock market dictated view, where the long term is the end of the fiscal year), rare earth extraction and sales are at 95% concentrated into a single country, when every high tech industry need to access it.

Hopefully, nothing similar has happened with the PHY, except that it’s an essential piece of modern semiconductor industry, and like CPU or DSP IP core, and that you find it in most of the ASIC and ASSP, providing the chip has to communicate through a protocol (PCIe, MIPI, USB, SATA, HDMI, etc.) or address an external DRAM at data rate over 1 Gb/s. By the way, I have answered your question: to me, the PHY IP is the master piece of the protocol based function. Developing high speed digital controller certainly require talented design architect, able to read and really understand the protocol specification, then to manage a digital design team implementing the function, and interfacing with a Verification team in charge of running the VIP to check for protocol compliance. But at the end, if the design team was mediocre, the IP will probably still work at spec, even if the latency could be too long, or the area or the power larger than what was optimally possible to reach.

Because PHY design is still heavily based on mixed-signal design techniques, developing first time right function is a much more challenging task requiring highly experienced designers. Would you follow a mediocre design approach, this will lead to failing result: there are simply too many reasons why a design could fail. So, creating a PHY design team requires to find highly specialized design engineers, the type of engineers starting to do a decent job after five or ten years of practice, and being good after fifteen or twenty years’ experience! This is the reason why, even if you look all around the world, you will only find a handful (maybe two if you take into account the chip makers) of PHY design capable teams. That’s why I am happy to welcome Silab Tech, one of these talented PHY IP vendors!

The PHY IP market, during the last couple of years, has consolidated:

  • Synopsys has acquired in 2012 MoSys PHY IP division (former Prism Circuit bought by MoSys in 2009),
  • Gennum (parent company of Snowbush, well known PHY IP vendor) was acquired by Semtech at the end of 2011 and the company decided to keep Snowbush PHY for their internal use, or to address very niche market.
  • VSemiconductor was developing Very High Speed PHY (up to 28 Gbps) for Intel foundry, finally Intel decided that it was even easier to buy the company, at the end of 2012.
  • Very recently, Cadence bought Cosmic Circuits, another mixed-signal IP vendor also selling MIPI and USB 3.0 PHY.

Consolidation is the mark for mature market, but the PHY part of the Interface IP market still has a strong growth potential: the overall (PHY and Controller) IP market has weighted $300M in 2012, but it should pass $500M in 2016. Moreover, if the Interface IP market revenue sharing was 50/50 in 2008 between PHY and Controller in value, the PHY IP share has been above 60% in 2012 and the trend will go on this way! Welcoming a new PHY IP vendor is certainly good news for chip makers, a diversified offer allowing better flexibility, offering more design options when selecting optimum technology node for a specific circuit.

As I mentioned earlier in this paper, to start a successful PHY and analog IP vendor, you need to rely on a strong, talented and experienced design team. As we can see on the above chart, Silab Tech founders have acquired most of their experience when working for TI. TI is known to be an excellent company to develop engineering competency, it is also a company where technical knowledge is valued at the same level than managerial. When, in many companies, the only way to progress is to become a manager, a good technical engineer can get the same level of reward than a good manager when working for TI. That’s the reason why Silab Tech’s management team exhibit various domain of expertize like PLL, DPLL, High Speed serial interface or ESD…

By the way, these are precisely the area of expertize you need to develop high speed PHY IP, like this you can see in the picture labeled “PHY: 2 lanes example”, extracted from a Silab Tech test chip recently taped out. To create an efficient PHY IP design team, the managers need to rely on a strong experience, but this is also true for the design engineers, and this is the case with Silab Tech, where most of the engineers have long analog design background, similar to the management team. No doubt that Silab Tech name will become very popular for the chip makers involved in large SoC design, like was Snowbush in the early 2010’s. But the difference with Silab Tech is that they are in the IP business to stay, develop the company and serve their customers.

By Eric Esteve from IPnest