SemiSerious

In the TechInsights tradition, every attempt is made to inspire those designers, engineers and builders who actually do the work of creating technology. To highlight this, a special awards ceremony was held recently in San Francisco. As many of you know, Semiconductor Insights has offered leading technology companies a chance to showcase their best efforts through the Insights Awards which have been handed out to deserving products for many years. As part of the larger TechInsights family, the SI Insight Awards are now presented along with the EETimes ACE Awards at the Embedded Systems Conference (ESC) organized by the TechInsights events team.

The Insight Awards is a year-long process whereby companies who feel their chips are worthy of recognition provide them to the Semiconductor Insights’ crack technology analysis team. After analyzing the performance, circuit architecture and manufacturing processes of the nominees, several sessions are held where the lead analysts present the case for the finalists in each category. The result of the intense analytical scrutiny and many heated debates is our list of winners for this year.

The Insight Award for Most Innovative DRAM technology was given to Micron for their 50nm 1Gb DDR2. If you want to learn more about this most advanced RAM, the best place to start is a great Carl Wintgens article on EETimes.

In a world dominated by iPods and portable media, the award for Most Innovative Non-Volatile Memory obviously holds special distinction (as well as well as contributing extra heat to the winners debates). This year’s very worthy recipient is Toshiba for their 43nm 16Gb NAND flash.

The third device category award in 2009 was presented for the Most Innovative Mobile Processor. The winner was Intel for the Atom processor. Who can argue? Intel devices power the lion’s share of netbooks, the hottest computing platform currently on the market. Not only that, but Intel is leading this charge with the most advanced logic process available today – its 45nm High-K metal gate technology.

And finally the award closest to my heart, for Most Innnovative Process Technology, went to IMFT for its 34nm, 32Gbit MLC, NAND Flash. Since this is an Intel-Micron JV, the Process Technology Award made it two each for both Intel and Micron. As SI’s GM, Emil Alexov pointed out at the ceremony, this is the first product beyond 40nm that we have analyzed. That’s quite a milestone, and it’s no surprise that it is was achieved through the collaboration of the likes of Intel and Micron.

For more a great roundup of ESC and the EETimes ACE Awards and the gala evening, your best bet is to go to see Junko Yoshida’s article on EETimes. The full list of winners is here and the photo gallery of the presentations is also available. The ACE presentations at ESC 09 included some special IEEE ACE honors as well. Please go to the excellent Spectrum Tech Talk blog to get their angle on the event.

So if you won for 2009, there’s no time to lose. Contact the awards coordinator (cystalc@semiconductor.com) to submit your best for 2010. If you didn’t win, our analysis team certainly did not minimize your accomplishments. There were many worthy finalists. Picking the winner was nothing close to easy. (If you read a previous post, you may have heard that it was a “long and sometimes arduous” process.) But if seeing your least favorite competitor receiving the championship trophy left a bad taste in your mouth, what better time is there to let us know why you deserve the crown in 2010?

Informally (which is certainly not to suggest that anything that goes on SemiSerious is formal) I keep a list of acronyms which are used for different things in different fields. With my memory being what it is, very few of these make it out of the dark recesses of my mind and into the light of day. That said, though, there is a danger of the topic turning into a serial item for this blog. (I know. Aren’t we all desperate for content.) Re-use of acronyms can get interesting and confusing when not too distant fields, let’s say two within the semiconductor industry itself, use the same TLA to refer to completely different things.

As I mentioned in a recent post, Semiconductor Insights technology analysts along with our Portelligent and EETimes colleagues have begun the task of selecting the winners for our annual Insight Awards recognizing the most innovative technologies appearing in the last year. A new award category for this year is the Mobile Processor. Without giving too much away regarding who may win the award for Most Innovative Mobile Processor, our analyst discussion turned to the netbook and the emerging category of device known as “MID” or mobile internet device as Wikipedia will inform you.

In fact, the top item returned from Google is this form of MID which takes you directly to the Wikipedia entry. There is actually a site for MID – mid.org, but that’s really not where I was headed with this post (that seemed like a good idea when working late and trying to avoid getting anything productive done.) The late night and what has piqued my interest lately is the history of solid-state imaging. And that’s where the other MID comes in. Image sensor techies who have been around long enough will know what I’m talking about. Long before CMOS image sensors were popular enough to be known as “CIS,” there were references to “MOS Imaging Devices.”

Okay, maybe these two MID’s are too far distant in time if not in technical field, but I think that’s what made it seems worth a blog post (right – it doesn’t take much). On the same day when I had the chance to participate in identifying one point on technology’s cutting edge, I was also digging progressively further back into history. And those two activities both brought me to MID.

This week marks the beginning of the long and sometimes arduous process of selecting winners in the SI Insight Awards in each of the technology categories. Of course, these are:

• Process Technology
• Non-volatile Memory
• DRAM
• Mobile Processor

Of course, it’s always a treat to talk to the creators of technology about their products. Sometimes, it’s more like listening to proud parents talk about their kids, but that isn’t always as painful as it sounds – unless you don’t like kids. Well, at SI we love the little offspring of all the different product groups out there. Dealing with the media relations, marketing groups and product managers means hearing lots about what sets each product apart from the competition. Ultimately, though, a seasoned group of Semiconductor Insights analysts will judge each entry on its significance to the industry as a whole.

The arduous part of this is sometimes comparing technologies that may not compete directly against each other in a product or technology space. Does the smallest feature size guarantee a Process Technology winner? Then, obviously, a memory device, or more likely, a flash memory device would always win. Maybe you have to discount the perfectly repetitive structure of the memory array and look at how dense the manufacturer packed in the logic gates. Alas, this would exclude a memory chip from winning since their digital circuits typically employ design rules miles behind both its own memory cells as well as leading edge pure logic devices like microprocessors.

Time to stop talking and start thinking about narrowing down the list of finalists in each of the categories. I certainly hope that this year’s Insight Awards inspire the creation of more leading edge devices (or at least their submission to our awards program) in 2009.

Considering this won’t go up until the third day of the conference, it just wouldn’t be right to call this “a preview.” However, last week, I had a chance to get just that from Mark Bohr as he provided an overview of Intel’s contribution to this year’s ISSCC program. Intel is very well-represented at the conference with a total of 15 papers including four of eight in the microprocessor session.

Although, I will not be attending the conference, I am receiving timely updates from our trio of engineers who are at ISSCC right now. Aaron Murray, James Bull, and Mohammad Ahmad are doing a great job of keeping everyone back here in Ottawa up-to-date on the happenings in San Francisco (at least the stuff that’s part of the official ISSCC agenda).

Mark Bohr’s plenary ended before I posted this, so there will soon be lots of places to find a digest of what he presented. The main point is that Intel is moving considerable effort into system-on-chip (SoC) development. As Mark showed, today’s microprocessors are actually really complex SoC devices incorporating several formerly discrete chipset components into a single IC. For example, the Core i7 – or Nehalem – design integrates the DRAM controller and DDR3 I/O’s. Intel is presenting more on Nehalem at the conference. Intel is looking to markets beyond the traditional PC to new, smarter mobile computing platforms. Mark summed it up like this: “Intel is no longer a one-size-fits-all company.”

Looking back, it’s interesting to recall a couple of events. First there was the great debate between TI on the SoC team and Intel on the system-in-package (SiP). At the time (I can’t recall how many years ago), Intel believed that it would be more cost-effective to bring various functionality together inside a package rather than monolithically on a single piece of silicon. Second was Intel’s XScale product line. XScale devices were once a hot topic amongst mobile device developers. But Intel sold the line to Marvell two-and-a-half years ago. What makes Intel circle back to SoC devices targeted beyond the traditional PC? Well, after the dust had settled on the Intel-TI SiP v. SoC debate and the XScale selloff, Apple introduced the iPhone. It’s success provided two key bits of information. First, it was possible for a smart phone to gain serious mass market appeal. Second, the iPhone suggested that a pocketable device was on the verge of being a serious computing platform. Now Intel returns to SoC, and it certainly has the manufacturing prowess to have a big impact in this space. Incidentally, part of Mark Bohr’s presentation touched on continued integration using the Atom core as a building block. Perhaps Intel intends to compete with ARM rather than license their technology as they did in the past with the XScale devices.

The bottom line is that Intel’s renewed interest in SoC technology is going to accelerate the development of ultra-portable computing platforms. Declining sales of the traditional desktop pc are fueling Intel’s move towards other markets. Growth in netbook sales and sockets for the Atom and similar devices are offsetting a lot of the loss in demand for more powerful microprocessors. But the netbook is only an transitional product. Computing is going more portable, and Intel will be ready.

Our marketing teamrecently launched the latest instance of the popular Insight Awards Program. We are rabidly seeking your submissions to the contest. This year, it is a coordinated event between EE Times, Portelligent, and Semiconductor Insights.

If you haven’t heard about this program before, it is a chance to use us to showcase your technology. But first, you need to submit your samples. Then Semiconductor Insights’ and Portelligent’s crack teams of technology analysts will compare your device to your competition. We pick the winner and publish the results in several prestigious media outlets such as EE Times.

An Insight Award will be presented to the most innovative device in each of these categories:

• Process Technology
• Mobile Processor
• Non-volatile Memory
• DRAM

Mobile processor is a brand-new award. Our technology “academy” will compare the field according to such key metrics as power consumption, package design, thermal design, and integration. The selection committee includes these industry luminaries:

• Ed Keyes, CTO of SI
• David Carey, President of Portelligent
• Patrick Mannion, EditorialDirectorof TechOnline

along with senior Semiconductor Insights analysts specializing in each category.

Our second new category is reserved not for an actual IC but for the Best Patent Coverage of a Technical Innovation.

For a list of previous winners, go to 2007 winners. The Insight Awards will help your product achieve the recognition it deserves. The Insight Award Team feels strongly that there are a number of important benefits:

• Opportunity to be showcased in an SI authored article published in a major electronics publication
• Technical documentation including summary of winning highlights, device description, 3rd party validation of technical claims, and an Insight Report
• Award presented during the AceAward gala dinner
• Press release announcing each winner
• Recognition on SI and EETimes/ACEAwards websites
• Two posters highlighting an innovative technology area of the device delivered to you

I think they left out the cool plexiglas sculpture (design still TBD) which should be reason enough to submit your product. Joking aside, it is a great opportunity to get objective third party validation for yourtechnology. You get worldwide bragging rights for a full year, and it’s another way for the engineers and the rest of your product team to feel good about their accomplishment. Past recipients look on their awards with pride every day and are inspired to create the next big thing in tech.

If you are interested in nominating a device or have any other questions about this program, please contact program coordinator, Crystal Carty (crystallc@semiconductor.com) at SI.

I am in London this week and just wrapped things up at the Intertech-Pira Image Sensor Conference. It was an interesting event with a diverse programme. There was everything from cameraphones to disposable endoscopes to swarms of robotic surveillance insects. Wait. The bugs were just my own nutty comment lifted from IEEE Spectrum. After a day where a single conference session dealt with both cameraphones and tiny cameras placed on the ends of laproscopic surgical instruments, Technology Review was very timely with their news of a cameraphone microscope.

But there was more to the conference than pictures of internal organs (right before lunch, thank you) and discussions of better ways of yanking gall bladders out through small pipes stuck into people.

What was hot? Well HDR – or high dynamic range – was. However, the definition of HDR was nowhere near consensus. HDR capability will be required in both security cameras as well as forward looking driver assistance cameras for cars. The other technology worth watching is backside illuminated imagers. Although it was not a featured topic in a session or even a single paper, it did pop up again in a few interesting places. I got turned onto the backside idea for the first time at IISW last May. Although it was introduced to me relatively recently, it’s been under investigation for a long time. Now it seems like it is picking up some momentum inside image sensor companies and starting to be considered for a potential production technology.

Sensors were not the only interesting discussion. Day two offered everything from the use of Flickr in image enhancement algorithms to shape memory alloys.

Graham Townsend, founder of Spiral Gateway, presented an interesting alternative to ASIC-based  Image Signal Processors (ISP). His team’s “soft” ISP approach avoids the 12 to 18 months lead time to get image processing algorithms hardwired into silicon. The obvious advantage is that the latest algorithms developed can be used in the cameraphone right as it goes into production, and they can be changed even after product launch simply by compiling new C code. Their chip is only slightly larger than a full custom ASIC providing the same processing (16 versus 14 square millimetres including I/O). The idea is based on RICA or re-configurable instruction cell array. Although I know virtually nothing about this architecture or other microprocessor alternatives, I would say the ISP application is only the tip of the iceberg. I can only explain it by borrowing one of Graham’s bullet points - ASIC netlists, wired up ‘on-demand’ in real time. (By the way, the iceberg analogy is quiteappropriate considering that co-chair, Lindsay Grant introduced Townsend by saying that Graham often referred to CMOS image sensors and imaging 10 years ago as just the tip of another iceberg.)

The shape memory alloys are being used by a company called 1…Limited to move the lens in an autofocus system. The alloy wire takes up almost no space (diameter is only 25 microns) inside the module providing space for larger lenses inside smaller modules. The next application of their wire is for adding zoom to future cameraphones.

Professor Raimondo Schettini from the University of Milano (Bicocca) gave an intriguing lecture on image enhancement techniques. These are more than the simple enhancements like automatic face detection or red-eye reduction that are so well known. His group has developed several algorithms for improving images based on decision trees to determine if the image is indoor or outdoor and so on to select the best algorithm based on determining the context in which the photograph was captured. A very interesting extension of that idea was the use of the web and the growing set of not only posted images but also user comments. This is visionary stuff. And I’m not just saying that because  my own presentation suggested that Google Street View might create the next image sensor boom! Professor Schettini intends to use the vast database available on Flickr to selectively apply algorithms to improve the image quality. As one slide pointed out, this is truly “data mining on all the available data.”
 
After IISW last May, this was my second chance to attend a relatively small meeting of image sensor technologists (and marketers as the case was this week). What I have discovered is that image sensor experts are not only extremely talented in their various fields but also a distinctly fun and classy group of people. I think there is a unique level of understanding within the imaging community that each sub-specialty represents only one part of a complex system that creates a final image and that all of the system components in delivering the final product are equally important.

Now an anecdote…I have a long and strange history of people getting my name wrong. I thought “Don” was pretty simple. I don’t know why, but the telephone company has listed me more than once as “Dan.” People I’ve met even several times often prefer “Dan” as well, but I thought everything would be okay here in London. I hoped I would come to a conference with my name correctly indicated in the programme (it was), give out some business cards with my name spelled properly (it was), and show a title slide with my name shown clearly as “Don,” and people would get it right. But I guess my parents were the ones who got it wrong. Within about 90 minutes of presenting yesterday, I was sitting at the same lunch table as an attendee who referred to me as “Dan the Insights guy.” I hope it doesn’t stick.

That’s all for Dan from London. (Well, if you can’t beat ‘em…)

The most respected entity in reverse engineering was sold yesterday to CMP Technology, our long-time media partner. With Semiconductor Insights now part of the CMP family, I may have to drop “Semi” from the title. Things are about to get “serious” around here but in a good way. We are starting down the road to new opportunities and concepts in the technical information space. I guarantee that you will begin to see new and exciting things from us in the near future.

If you just crawled out from under a rock or you were too busy filling orders for Saskatchewan sealskin bindings, you may not have heard about Apple’s iPhone launch last Friday. Fortunately, we did, and our crack marketing team stood in a Boston Apple Store line for 12 hours, raced back to HQ here in Ottawa, and promptly smashed the poor thing to bits. The result was the revelation of the secret inner hardware in a tasteful video.

As many reviews including our own have pointed out, there was nothing earth-shaking discovered on the high-level IC parts list. But exploring the nether regions of integrated circuits is our business, and we have discovered one interesting device so far. The EDGE radio module contains an innovative product from Peregrine Semiconductor. This device is an SP4T switch for use in the RF path of a radio (cell phone) to switch between transmit and receive circuit connections to the single antenna. It is based on what Peregrine has trademarked as UltraCMOS. This technology is silicon-based. It is a subset of silicon-on-insulator, but does not use the oxide of silicon for the insulator as we often see in typical SOI devices. For this high performance application, UltraCMOS uses a sapphire substrate as the platform for adding silicon transistors. What you get is silicon-on-saphhire or S-O-S.

Peregrine’s UltraCMOS device is very interesting. The iPhone is the first consumer product we have pulled one out of. Peregrine’s technology is the only silicon-based circuit for this application. Its competitors are complex III-V and derivative compounds patterned as p-HEMTs and other such beasts. (Check my last post for some background on III-V’s.)

Despite the undeniable cool factor of the iPhone and the Peregrine UltraCMOS, the real news here is that our world-leading SCM team has produced 2D carrier concentration profiles of this type of device for the first time. Acquiring two-dimensional carrier profiles by SCM is a daunting task for any type of SOI device. However, it proved to be no obstacle for my amazing colleague, Dr. Jochonia Nxumalo. You can see some CMOS devices at the left and the Peregrine die markings in the SCM image at the top of this post.