Plenary Session II

8:30am-11:50am

Co-Chairs: 

Kris Verma, ISQED Plenary Committee Chair

Res Saleh, ISQED Conference Chair

8:30am

Introduction

8:45am

2P.1 The Role of ICs in the Creation of a Connected World and the importance of Product Quality

Atiq Raza
Chairman and CEO, Raza Foundries Inc.

Human Beings being social have had a need to communicate.  The modern chapter in enabling large scale communication has been aided by intelligence in the transport, distribution, protection, traffic management, decoding, analyzing and displaying of communication content.  The intelligence has been embedded in an explosive confluence of Software, Systems and Integrated Circuits.  This has resulted in the most amazing transformation of the way we live our lives, work, and engage in all other necessary and capricious activity.  It has also created a huge economic footprint on the Gross Domestic Product of the United States of America.  With a massive transformation that has occurred in such a short time, this throbbing network across the planet has to operate reliably because of the precious payload it carries.

9:25am

2P.2 Wireless Systems-on-a-Chip Design

Bob Brodersen

Dept. of EECS , University of California, Berkeley

There is a fundamental shift that is occurring in the implementation of wireless systems. Not only is the underlying technology shifting to mainstream CMOS technology, but the applications and specifications of the supported links is also rapidly evolving. The multiple inter-related technologies required for implementation of such wireless systems requires a co-design strategy in communication algorithms, digital architectures as well the analog and digital circuits required for their implementation. Critical to good design of these chips is the definition of energy and area performance metrics that can facilitate the tradeoff of issues such as the cost of providing flexibility or the amount of parallelism to exploit. These design decisions can result in diffences of orders of magnitude in the metrics between what is possible in the technology and what is often achieved if the costs are not fully understood. A design infrastructure which supports  architectures, which optimizes the metrics, will be described for wireless systems that provides a fully automated chip design flow design flow from a high level system specification.

10:05am

Break

10:30am

2P.3 Microwave III-V Semiconductors for Telecommunications and Prospective of the III-V Industry

Chan Shin Wu

President and CEO, WIN Semiconductors

The Microwave III-V semiconductor IC technology (Primarily GaAs) has emerged as a powerful, enabling, technology for the wireless and optical communications in the past 5 years. It has been dominating, or making substantial penetration into, the market for handset power amplifiers and switches, advanced wireless LAN RF front-ends and various other key RF components for broadband wireless, wireless infrastructure, satellite telecommunications, high data rate fiber optical communications and automotive radar applications. The Microwave III-V semiconductor IC industry has grown dramatically in the past 2-3 years. It is worth noting that the majority of the recently formed GaAs Fabs are located in Taiwan.  Their intent is to provide pure-play foundry services following the silicon foundry business model developed by TSMC and UMC. In this presentation, we will discuss the key components of III-V microwave transistors (HBT, pHEMT and MESFET etc.) and their RFICs/MMICs, their electrical performance, major applications, market status, trends and opportunities. We will define the current status for the global III-V semiconductors industry, the rapidly growing GaAs MMIC Fab industry in Taiwan and its advantages for providing a one-stop, total solution for the wireless and optical communication components customers.  

11:10am

2P.4  Tomorrows High-quality SoCs Require High-quality Embedded Memories Today

Ulf Schlichtmann

Senior Director, Infineon Technologies AG

Embedded memories increasingly dominate SoC designs - whether chip area, performance, power consumption, manufacturing yield or design time are considered. ITRS data indicate that the embedded memory contents of ICs may increase from 20% in 1999 to 90% at the 50nm node by the end of the decade. Therefore, even more than today, the success of tomorrow's SoC design will depend on the availability of high-quality embedded memories. Advanced process technologies pose new challenges for meeting these quality criteria. Some of the challenges are: providing flexible redundancy solutions for embedded SRAMs; designing competitive memories despite ever increasing leakage currents; reducing SRAM susceptibility to soft-error rate (SER). These challenges are bringing about the need for significant innovations in design of embedded memories, much more so than in recent previous process generations. In the presentation, the challenges will be outlined and solutions will be proposed. The focus of the discussion will be on SRAM/ROM, but other technologies such as eDRAM and "1T SRAM" will also be addressed.