SemiSerious

Well, I certainly believed it would be Intel before Engagdget started trying to change my mind. That site claimed that Panasonic Blu-ray DVD recorders seen at CEATEC contained the UniPhier (Universal Platform for High-quality Image Enhancing Revolution) chip allegedly built with Matsushita’s 45nm technology. The DVD units are scheduled to roll November 1. Engagdget previously reported that Panasonic began mass producing 45nm wafers in June.

Panasonic describes the UniPhier features as:

“Smooth image data communication can be realized, and this has been achieved by employing multi decoding technology, which is capable of simultaneously processing two large screens of high picture quality and full-HD, and MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 encoding technology, which compresses a full-HD image into 1/2 to 1/3 its original size compared with the conventional technology.”

Those data compression requirements sound a lot like the HDC-SD5 camcorder spec. However, the Panasonic IC found in the HiDef camcorder is nowhere near 45nm. The 2WS0055 is actually 130nm technology with only six copper metals. That’s not all. The HDC-SD5 relies on an external video codec IC – Fujitsu’s 90nm MB86H51. The audio codec is also external – from AKM. That’s at least a three component solution in the camcorder.

Will the Uniphier chip for the set-top DVD recorder really be 45nm? If you need to take the circuits from the 2WS0055 and add two of what’s inside the MB86H51 codec, the die size might only be economical if you build the beast in 45nm technology. Except for the audio chip, the die sizes are:

• Panasonic 2WS0055        104 sq mm
• Fujitsu MB86H51
• Codec                      91 sq mm
• FCRAM (256M X 2)  114 sq mm

The Fujitsu video codec with logic die stacked on top of the two DRAM die also adds an extra 750mW to the load on the camera batteries.

If Panasonic/Matsushita were as close to 45nm as they are saying, wouldn’t they prefer to use the advanced technology, single-chip solution in their battery-powered products, where board space is at a premium?

Although it has not yet generated as much buzz as the iPhone, the iPod Touch could be the best product designed in Cupertino. The most striking feature of the iPhone was, after all, its touch screen and navigation. More than a few people touted the iPhone as the best iPod ever, and some claimed they were not even interested in it being a phone. A lot of that may have been the Apple’s decision to push its first handset through AT&T with restrictive contracts and an initial price of around $700. All that got people talking about how great a $400 iPhone without a phone would be…not a bad marketing move on Apple’s part.

Apple rewarded the patient in September when it unveiled the iPod Touch, the no-phone iPhone. So what do you get? Of course, the Touch offers all the large landscape LCD and touch navigation, but it also got thinner. The Touch is only 8mm while the iPhone case is about 11.6mm thick. So how does one reduce the thickness by over 30 percent? By taking out the mobile phone functionality? Nope.

Cellphone companies have pressured camera designers for years to reduce the height of their modules. However, there is a limit to how close you can get the lensing to the imager chip. In the iPhone case, the camera module is about 7.5mm – almost the full thickness of the Touch. The lens barrel alone is more than 4mm long. Sorry guys, but there’s no workaround for the physics here. The Micron MT9D112 2MP camera-on-a-chip active pixel array is 3.5mm wide and 2.7mm high, and the quarter inch format lens needs the room to focus.

If you have attempted to post comments to articles on this site and are wondering what happened to them, please accept my apologies. Technical difficulties have left many recent comments in limbo. I promise that your patience will be rewarded next week when you will, at last, see these on SemiSerious. I think many of these will spark some meaningful debate on technology.

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Steve Jobs may have a golden touch, but who would have ever connected Apple’s iPhone to the sixties Bond classic, Goldfinger? Well, some folks at Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) did. Some CSR chip designers were either great James Bond fans or not quite fans of one particular project. (I trust they weren’t talking about Steve.) The design is the Bluecore 4 chip found in the iPhone that provides the iPhone’s Bluetooth capability. One of the die markings is “Oddjob” and there is also die art of that character from Goldfinger. Being an admirer of the Bond series more than a fanatic, I have to thank CSR for adding the written reference to Oddjob.

But there are even some technically interesting features of one of the iPhone’s radio modules. The Wireless LAN (WLAN) IC is particularly interesting. The Marvell 88W8686 transceiver is the first device on the market that integrates RF functionality on a 90nm logic IC.  (The 90nm technology node is confirmed by a 6T SRAM cell size of 1.14 square microns.) The Marvell 88W8686 chip is advertised as the world’s first ultra-low-power, 90nm (WLAN) single-chip solution. The device integrates an ARM compliant CPU, and high-speed serial host interfaces. The advanced RF transceiver supports the IEEE 802.11 a/b/g standards. Marvel uses a thick Media Access Control (MAC) architecture in their design to offload the host CPU resulting in lower power consumption and increased system performance. I suppose it is no surprise that we gave it an Insight Award for innovation this year.

It is interesting to note that while both the Marvell 88W8686 and the CSR Bluecore 4 die are found separately on the iPhone, they are again bundled as a WLAN and Bluetooth system-in-package (SiP) solution in the Wi2Wi W2CBW003. The Marvell 88W8686 device provides for both traditional bond wires as well as flip-chip packaging options to allow the form factor of the SoC to be as small as possible depending on the users specific bonding requirements.

A third option allows for wafer scale packaging or mounting another packaged device directly onto the large metal areas before going ahead with wire bonding to the traditional IO ring. These bump pads are 200 microns in diameter and are placed throughout the chip. I guess it’s that package-on-package flexibility that makes it right at home in the iPhone.
 

Confusion abounds about the manufacturer and type of microprocessor found in Apple’s iPhone. With over a million units shipped to date and Apple on the verge of launching their revolutionary computing platform into Europe, the timing is right to reveal the “secret.” Actually, I am just revisiting Semiconductor Insights’ revelation from July as reported in EETimes. Our own Greg Quirk was quoted identifying an Apple branded Samsung stacked die package containing the S5L8900 processor.

Although nearly three months have passed since Quirk and his team first laid bare the guts of the iPhone, a search for “iPhone processor” information still yields primarily speculation and conclusions based on software tests. I’m hopeful this post will get Google taking Semi Serious a lot more seriously.

But the source of the iPhone’s brainpower is not the end of the story (fortunately for this scribe). The chip Samsung supplied to Apple contains a significant first. The iPhone processor is the first package-on-package or PoP device with significant market presence. Unlike earlier devices that contained multiple die that were stacked, bonded, and then encapsulated with plastic molds, the Samsung processor chip takes two independently packaged devices and stacks them. This decreases the board footprint of an apps processor in the same way a single package with stacked die would. However, the package gets taller. The Samsung PoP configuration is 1.3mm high (not including solder ball height at the system PCB interface). Most of the difference comes from the inter-package solder balls that are about 0.35mm in diameter. That’s still a fairly low profile package and a very small price to pay since 1.3mm presents little if any challenge for Apple’s contract manufacturers. After all, the iPhone includes a camera and the image sensor module is typically the limiting factor in keeping the final product thin.

There is a big upside to using PoP. It allows package and test of the cheap commodity DRAM independent of the more precious high performance logic IC. This creates flexibility in the test programs and allows a kind of “final” test on each packaged device before marrying them into the system-in-package (SiP). But there is a big manufacturing cost advantage because of de-risking potential loss of the logic IC. An expensive advanced process logic IC could easily end up in the junk pile because of the relatively complex assembly process required to stack memory and logic in the same package.

But wait. There’s even more to the Samsung apps processor at the die level. The device is manufactured in 90nm technology. That’s not cutting edge, but there is DRAM embedded on the die. Samsung integrates approximately 1.2M of e-DRAM along with about 375K of the more traditional SRAM SoC memory.

Has Samsung concluded the SiP versus SoC debate by bundling them all together in a single device?