Earlier this year, Mark Horowitz gave a talk at the 1st Berkeley Symposium on Energy Efficient Systems titled “Why Design Must Change: Rethinking Digital Design.” I did not have the chance to attend that symposium, but was lucky enough to attend an encore presentation by Mark a few days ago at the University of Texas, Austin as part of the Computer Architecture Seminar Series. If you don’t know who Mark Horowitz is then you truly must have been hiding underneath a rock. Suffice it to say he is pretty well regarded in the electrical engineering community, having received several best paper awards over the years, being the current chair of electrical engineering at Stanford University, and also having co-founded a little company called Rambus – so yes, when he speaks people generally tend to listen. The complete presentation slide as well as a recording of the Berkeley presentation can be found here . What follows below is quick summary of the talk and s few comments of my own.

The main point around which the talk revolves is as follow: Design costs and power dissipation have over the last decades gone through the roof. The good news is that some of the major contributing factors such as die growth and super frequency scaling have somewhat stopped. The bad news is that voltage scaling has also hit some limits. As voltage seizes to scale downwards, our biggest tool for scaling energy becomes significantly less effective. Mark is not optimistic on overcoming these challenges since overcoming limitations set by fundamental physics is rather difficult. For example he is very concerned about the on/off current ratio, which is a valid concern, but with regards to that I’m fairly certain that for several of the upcoming process generations, the process engineers have quite a few neat tricks up their sleeves. Mark is convinced that while silicon is not going away any time soon, the growth rate is going slow down significantly and eventually we will think of silicon the same way think about concrete and steel. Thus, instead of hoping that the process guys will save the day, we really need to figure out how to use what we already have, and by this he means we need to figure out how to reduce the amount of waste in our systems.

Some of the waste stems from the fact that maybe we are simply doing more work than we really need to – after all, if we do less work we will need less energy. This of course, could be caused by the fact that we are using the wrong tool for the job, and thus are creating more work than needed. The fact is that for specific tasks ASIC designs are more efficient that DSPs/Vector Engines, which in turn are more efficient than CPUs. Unfortunately, ASICs while efficient are also prohibitively expensive and few markets can justify their use. Which brings us full-circle back to where we started a few paragraphs ago: designing specific chips that do what we need, and do it well while consuming little power is way too expensive. The solution: A chip generator. Now, before you panic and say we’ve been there and tried that, relax, Mark is not talking about silicon compilers, that will take your nicely written high-level C++ algorithm and convert it into a perfectly working, super power efficient silicon that has been verified automatically - a nice dream indeed.

Instead, the message that Mark is sending to the chip and SoC design houses is that the designs they are putting together are most likely not the optimal solutions for what applications the customers have in mind. Instead, he would prefer if these companies instead of trying to guess what the customers want should rather put their efforts into developing a chip generator that would allow the eventual consumer to configure the final SoC as needed. Want half the cache: no problem - want to eliminate some not needed IOs: no sweat - need to configure your memory differently to optimize the performance, or add some extra math processing: no sweat. Essentially, let the customer figure out what they need, and you just focus on developing a tool that will put it together for them. I have to admit Mark, this does sound fantastic indeed. As a matter of fact, it is something that occurred to me a while ago while working on several SoCs that were very similar, but not similar enough for some of our customers, and thus required separate design spins. The problem is that while the chip generator might be more feasible than a silicon compiler, it is still something immensely difficult to pull off.

For one thing, if chips are difficult to design, it is quite conceivable that to design something that will design these chips might be even more so – is it worth it? Also, while process scaling might slow down one day, and library updates might become less frequent, that day is not here yet. Once again, if migrating a chip from one process to another is a major undertaking, optimizing the generator for the next process might be more work then re-doing some designs while adding a few customer requested enhancements. I’ve worked on several tools that had to be ported to new processes and most of the time it took more work than was anticipated. Finally, parameterizing a few things here and there is probably possible, but making things you as a company own configurable and then ensuring that they will play nice with third party IP provided by other companies, that can also be parametrized, is another story. Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree with Mark’s vision, and I do think that the future does require what he is suggesting, but process scaling really needs to slow down significantly for this to happen, and that is simply not yet the case. Too bad I forgot to ask him about the time horizon that he had in mind for the chip generator to become a reality.

Competition in the RF Power Amplifier (PA) space is definitely heating up. Last month, Black Sand Technologies announced the world’s first 3G CMOS based RF PA. Earlier this month, VT Silicon, announced the world’s first silicon-based 4G PA. Based out of Atlanta, GA, VT Silicon is fabless semiconductor startup which was incorporated in 2002 and initially focused primarily on military applications. In 2007, the company kicked off efforts to commercialize some of the developed technology, specifically targeting WiMax applications. At about the same time VT Silicon raised $3.3 million in Series A funding from Menlo Ventures. VT Silicon’s first chip will be the VMF2500 WiMax/WiFi Front End RFIC, for which the block diagram is shown below.

Instead of gallium arsenide (GaAs), which is traditionally used for power amplifiers, VT Silicon intends to use Silicon Germanium (SiGe) BICMOS which has a significant cost advantage over GaAs, and as such should be of interest to mobile device manufacturers. The company has developed what it refers to as Linearity Enhancement Technology (LET), which improves the linear operating range of their amplifiers, resulting in less signal distortion and yielding a more power efficient system. It is this LET technology that enables the company to use SiGe instead of GaAs while still delivering competitive performance. Further, SiGe enables VT Silicon to integrate a complex CMOS control circuit directly onto the IC, which the company refers to as Intelligent RF. This circuitry can then be utilized to continually tweak the configuration of the PA to optimize performance for lowest power consumption based on factors such as battery voltage, temperature, or the TX power level. The CMOS circuitry also enables the IC to be software configurable. All in all, the VMF2500 becomes a single chip RF PA solution, as opposed to multi-chip solutions that are comment these days on the front end. The company expects the quiescent current for chip to be less than 45mA when in low-power TX mode. Samples for strategic partners are expected to become available in the 2nd quarter of 2010, with mass production targeted the follow in the 4th quarter.

One list we definitely have come to appreciate over the years is the EETimes Emerging Startups List. Every few months the list gets updated, and it just so happens that a few days ago it was updated to version 9.0. On occasion these updates are lackluster featuring few new emerging startups, however, just like last time around, this new list contains plenty of new additions. This time around new companies accounted for almost 30 percent of the list. Once again, California did rather well claiming 30 percent of the newly added companies; however, Europe also claimed a surprising 35 percent of the list. Several of the newly added companies will be familiar to regular ChipCrunch readers, but just in case a refresher is needed, we provided links to our previous coverage of these companies where applicable. The new additions are summarized below:

• AutoESL Design Technologies Inc. (Cupertino, CA) – Is developing next generation High-Level Synthesis (HSL) technology. Current product is titled AutoPilot, and can synthesize designs written in C, C++, and SystemC.

• BlackSand Technologies Inc. (Austin, TX) – has developed the world’s first CMOS based 3F RF power amplifier. ChipCrunch coverage: 1, 2, 3
  

• Blue Wonder Communications GmbH (Dresden, Germany) – independent design house and a licensor of Long Term Evolution (LTE) Intellectual Property (IP), which is a next generation mobile standard.

• Direct2Silicon Inc. (San Jose, CA) – provides software and IP that enables direct write e-beam lithography for System-on-Chip integrated circuits (SoCs). Direct write e-beam technology requires neither optical lithography nor masks, thus ought to be cheaper for small production runs according to the company.

• Energy Micro A/S (Oslo, Norway) – is developing energy efficient microcontrollers based on modern microprocessor architectures. Current products are based on the ARM Cortex-M3 processor.

• Everspin Technologies Inc. (Chandler, Ariz.) – spinoff from Freescale Semiconductor that specializes in Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) and integrated magnetic sensors.

• Liquavista BV (Eindhoven, Netherlands) – is developing electronic screen technology based on the principles of Electrowetting. Electrowetting enables color displays that utilize significantly less battery power, and are currently targeted at electronic readers.

• Netronome Systems Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA) – specializes in intelligent network flow processing using highly programmable network flow processors and acceleration cards targeted at enterprise-class communications products.

• OneChip Photonics Inc. (Ottawa, Canada) – is developing and manufacturing low-cost, high-performance optical transceivers based on monolithic Photonic Integrated Circuits (PICs) in Indium Phosphide (InP) , with which the company is hoping to enable ubiquitous deployment of Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH).

• Open Kernel Labs (Chicago, IL) – specializes in mobile phone virtualization solutions. To date, the OKL4 Microvisor has shipped in over 300 million phones worldwide.

• Ozmo Devices Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) – is developing Wi-Fi compatible communication technologies target at battery-operated devices, with the intent of delivering cost-effective wireless personal area networks (WPAN) connectivity.

• PolyIC GmbH & Co. KG (Fuerth, Germany) – is developing polymer electronic technology, in other words electrical conducting and semi conducting plastics, which the company hopes will usher in the age of ubiquitous printed electronics.

• Powervation Ltd. (Limerick, Ireland) – specializes in digital power control circuits, an earlier this year introduced the company’s inaugural PV3002 power conversion chip. ChipCrunch coverage: 1, 2

• Samplify Systems Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) – is developing mixed-signal ICs, that combine high performance analog circuits with advanced digital processing to create a new class of intelligent data converters for DSP systems, targeting the medical imagining, wireless, defense, and communications markets.

• Semprius Inc. (Durham, NC) – is developing technology that enables the printing of high-performance semiconductors on a wider range of substrates. The company’s primary focus currently is high performance concentrator photovoltaic (CPV) modules for solar power generation. ChipCrunch coverage: 1
  
• Tabula Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) – is working on software and hardware solutions that the company claims will replace current FPGA solutions and will speed up the adoption of programmable logic devices for what are traditionally ASIC based solutions.
• Tiempo SA (Grenoble, France) – is developing IPs and EDA tools that enable the design of clock-less integrated circuits. The company’s current IP includes asynchronous microcontroller cores, microprocessors, as well as communication and sensor interfaces.