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There is nothing more interesting than competing technologies pursuing the same end product or application. In the blue corner, founded in 1985 and weighting in at close to 70 patents, please welcome the heavy-weight Anadigics from the GaAs camp. In the opposite red corner, please welcome the feather-weight challengers Black Sand Technologies and VT Silicon from the CMOS camp. All right, the above might be somewhat playful and exaggerated, but this does not mean that a real fight pitting Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) Power Amplifiers (PAs) vs. CMOS based PAs is not shaping up. Take for example the recent column over at EETimes titled "CMOS is the wrong technology for 3G handset PAs ," in which Mario Rivas, the president and CEO of Anadigics Inc., comes out swinging. His claims, paraphrased here for conciseness sake, are as follows: Today’s CMOS amplifiers are not capable of delivering sufficient linear output power to consistently overcome obstacles such as walls, ceilings and trees. Further, GaAs PAs can achieve close to 45 percent efficiency, implying that they are more efficient than CMOS based PAs. GaAs based PAs are more rugged and can deal better with changing environments conditions. And finally, GaAs technology has matured and issues are well understood, resulting in shorter design cycle times as opposed to new and emerging CMOS based implementations. Mario does concede that at some point CMOS based amplifiers might play a role, but not in the near term and not for 3G/4G applications.

Now contrast his claims to those made by the CMOS camp. For example, Black Sand Technologies proudly claims in their most recent press release, which discusses their acquisition of CMOS PA intellectual property from Silicon Laboratories, that replacing GaAs PAs with CMOS based ones improves manufacturing yield, performance, cost, battery life, and call quality. Pretty much countering all the claims made in favor of GaAs by Mario above. Add to this claims from VT Silicon, a startup pursuing silicon based PAs based on Silicon-Germanium (SiGe), of highly linear performance and once again lower production cost.  Add into the mix integrated control circuitry that allows for real-time performance adjustment and power management for the PAs, and ladies and gentlemen we have a fight on our hands! I will be the first one to admit that power amplifiers are absolutely not my forte but this does not preclude me from asking the following: Is Anadigics trying to protect their turf by touting the superiority of the GaAs solutions? Or, being a long time player in the PA space, are they simply utilizing their vast experience and knowledge and pointing out some of the limitations of the current CMOS based solutions. Conversely, are these startups overly optimistic in order to build hype and a market for their products? Will they be remembered as large on promises and short on delivery?  Time will tell, but regardless it will be an interesting conflict to watch as it evolves.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to look through some of the research that the Kauffman Foundation has conducted recently, which is a real shame since these guys do indeed publish some very interesting reports. Back in 2007, we reviewed a rather lengthy report titled “On the Road to an Entrepreneurial Economy” which focused on policies the government should institute to promote innovative entrepreneurship. With the holiday season here and news on the semiconductor startup front rather on the slow side, we came across a rather short but relevant report that focuses on future job creation. Titled “Where Will the Jobs Come From?” this report examines the job creation patterns using the United Stated Census Bureau data from the last few years. The report contains a myriad of charts showing job creation vs. company age, job creation vs. company size, job creation vs. industry sector and so on, but the overall findings can be summarized in a single sentence: While large companies are important since they are part of a complex economic system in which the acquisitions they fund are essential exit strategies for a lot of startup companies, it is the actual startups which especially early on in their life cycle have been the major job creation engine in the United States. As such, policy makers ought to places most emphasis on enabling entrepreneurs in creating these young firms. The above is clearly somewhat of an oversimplification of the findings, but as noted previously, this report is rather on the short side and can be easily read over a cup of joe.

Once in a while you run across an interesting web-site, that while probably not of too much use to those who are deeply familiar with a particular field, might be of quite some use to those in adjacent and related fields. Let’s face it, for most design engineers it is very difficult not to get pigeonholed. That is, we are very familiar with the particular tools that are required for us to perform our daily job, but our knowledge of tools that another horizontal group in the organization might be using is very limited. It becomes even worse when one works for a company that mostly utilizes internal tools, for then you might become completely oblivious to what external tools in your field of practice might be capable of. Even if you make the effort to learn about some of the external offerings, you might get as far as the big three (Cadence, Synopsys, and Mentor), and have no idea about all the startups that are working on new and innovative tools. Well, as it turns out if you are interested in electronic design automation (EDA), you might be in luck, for there exists a website called Demos On Demand, that features a generous amount of videos from a myriad of EDA vendors.

The presentations are organized into several high-level categories such as front-end, back-end, low-power, manufacturing and so one. Under each of these categories one can find further sub-categories to ease the search process for videos of interest. The site also features interviews with what it labels as experts, which most of the time turn out to be the founders of particular companies. It features a few training tutorials, however these are very limited, so one is probably better off going to a particular company’s website for help and tutorials. The seminar selection is nominally better, although a few more would not hurt. From the startup perspective, the most interesting section is hands down the featured startup section under featured content. There, one can find a list of descriptions and videos for 25 or so startups in the EDA field. Now, I’m no EDA expert, but several of the companies on the list have been acquired by now, so it might be that the site’s content might be a little dated. Also, don’t expect any in-depth content in the videos; they are more or less technical marketing sales presentations for a company’s product. One annoying thing is that one needs to login to view the full video content. Creating an account in itself would not be much of an issue if the account creation worked properly that is. I had serious issues logging-in after creating my account. Nevertheless, as a springboard for finding out about some of the EDA startups out there this site is a decent start.

There are so many interesting conferences, symposia, and panel discussions that it is pity that one cannot attend them all. As such, it is always nice when someone who does attend an interesting event, takes the time to post of few highlight. Even better when a nice succinct trip report with some observations and commentary is provided. This time, the thanks go out to Mike Demler, and his The World is Analog blog for providing excellent coverage from the 10th Annual Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA) What’s Hot and What’s Not in Mobility 2009 investor panel discussion that occurred last week in Santa Clara, CA. Part 1 of the report can be found here, and part two can be found here. The panel consisted of Eric Zimits (Managing Director, Granite Ventures), Dev Khare (Vice President, Venrock), Tim Chang (Principal, Nortwest Venture Partners, and Scott Raney (Partner, Redpoint Ventures), and was moderated by Scott Ellison (VP Mobility Wireless, IDC). I encourage you to take some time and read both parts as they contain some interesting highlights and observations on a variety of subjects including: venture capital, mobile - software, services, infrastructure, TV, health, commerce, and advertising - just to mention a few.

If you are only interested in semiconductor startup related comments, here are the key takeaways: Startup capital for fabless digital design startups is almost non-existent. And while that Panelists placed the blame on China’s plethora of fabless design startups, I’m more in agreement with Mike’s observation that it is the cost of developing chips on the leading edge process that has erased the value proposition for potential investors. The Panelists were in agreement on the fact that RF and analog areas where a much better opportunity for semiconductor startups mostly due the smaller team sizes that are needed. The number of RF and mixed-signal startups that we have covered on this blog over the last few months very much supports this notion. As a matter of fact, I would say that any startup that can take what is usually considered an analog design problem and can find a digital implementation for it stands a good chance of finding some funding especially in the wireless space. On a related note, Femtocells are also becoming increasingly of interest mostly due to the bandwidth overloading that is currently experienced by the majority of the wireless carriers. We covered a startup called Percello last year that specializes in basebend processors for the Femtocell market. Finally, on the mobile processor side of things, the panelists held a strong believe that ARM will eat Intel’s lunch over the next few years and displace Intel’s Atom processor in the netbook/smartbook and smartphone markets. Once again I have to agree with Mike that one should never underestimate Intel, even if they are a relative newcomer to the SoC space (disclosure: I do have an affiliation with Intel; however, the opinions on this blog are purely and completely mine, and are not reflective of Intel’s opinions and business strategy).