[xDSL Chips]
Electronic Buyer's News April 07, 1997, Issue: 1052 Section: Technology Focus Analog Opportunities -- Budding comm. markets spell healthy growth for the historically stable linear-IC sector.
By
Steady as she goes is the best way to describe the analog-IC market, compared with the splashier and more volatile markets for digital devices.
But in the calm analog-IC waters, a wave of fast-growing communications applications is buoying demand. Emerging computer and consumer applications are also boosting the analog-IC market's prospects.
Integrated Circuit Engineering Corp. (ICE) sees the worldwide market for analog, or linear, ICs growing at a compound annual rate of 18% from 1992 to 1996 and 16% from 1996 to 2001.
Although this sector has lagged behind the overall IC market and is forecast to continue that way, companies specializing in linear devices manage to stay healthy and profitable, and will continue to do so, said Brian Matas, an analyst with ICE, Scottsdale, Ariz. "Mature product types don't suffer the same drastic price erosion over time that some digital products do, and the profits from those help fuel product research and development."
Despite its historical stability, the linear-IC business was not immune from the recent industrywide inventory correction. But analysts foresee improved top and bottom lines in this sector for this year.
"More normal seasonal patterns" have returned to the analog-IC market, said Mark Fitzgerald, an analyst with UBS Securities LLC, San Francisco. He expects most regions, except Japan, to post stronger orders and shipments in the first calendar quarter.
Defining the market
A variety of products come under the analog umbrella: amplifiers, interface devices, voltage regulators and voltage references, data converters (including both A/D and D/A converters), comparators, and "other" devices.
Within the worldwide analog market, which ICE estimates reached $17.5 billion last year, the segment predicted to have the highest growth - a 19% compound annual rate between now and 2001 - is the category many analysts call "other analog." This sector includes individual mixed-signal devices and noncustom, application-specific chip sets.
The primary growth drivers in the "other analog" category are ICs for telecom applications, according to analysts.
The list of burgeoning communications applications includes GSM and its variants (PCS 1900 and DCS 1800), Digital Enhanced Cordless Telephone (DECT), cellular base stations, Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS), and RF and IF circuits for wireless systems.
Analog-IC makers are able to address a large portion of the IC requirements for cellular phones - including the ASIC, baseband, DSP, power management, and RF functions.
In the wired camp, asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) technology is gaining ground. Analysts expect the technology to become increasingly important in the next 18 to 24 months.
Other trends in analog ICs - in addition to the perpetual drive for smaller packages and lower power consumption - are noteworthy. In op amps, the trend is toward wider bandwidths and power management features that make the devices more suitable for battery-powered applications such as portable communications and instrumentation.
In A/D converters, speed (sampling rate) and resolution (number of bits) are major issues, but this is true at both ends of the performance spectrum. At the low end, low-speed 8-bit A/Ds are used extensively to monitor - and report to the main processor - slowly varying voltages such as battery output and temperature and display-brightness settings. At the high end, 14-bit and 16-bit resolutions and sampling rates near and above 1 million samples/s are common.
Price competition is present even at the high end. Linear Technology Corp., for example, recently announced a 26% price cut for its 14-bit LTC-1409, LTC-1410, and LTC-1415.
"We're trying to be more aggressive in the A/D converter business," said Todd Nelson, product marketing engineer for data conversion at the Milpitas, Calif., company.
Nelson believes the data-conversion sector will see healthy growth in the future. "The more applications there are for DSPs, the more expansion there will be in data converters. The so-called digital revolution, to us, means a lot more need for data conversion."
Defining mixed-signal devices
"Mixed signal" generally refers to an IC with both analog (continuously varying voltages and/or currents) and digital (voltages and/or currents either on or off) signals present in the same piece of silicon. However, Steve Szirom, an analyst at HTE Research, San Francisco, considers mixed-signal a gray area. "There are many mostly digital circuits that have a few embedded analog functions, but we categorize those as digital devices," he said. "Even DSP devices are, for market research purposes at least, categorized as digital."
Most industry players agree that a true mixed-signal device should be at least 50% analog. But how this 50% is measured - functionality, amount of silicon area - has not been clearly defined.
Another characteristic of mixed-signal devices is that not many of them could be considered "standard" products in the traditional sense. The standard products that do exist are mostly mass-storage ICs for disk drives and some specialized communications circuits.
Most other mixed-signal products appear in noncustom, application-specific devices (filters, codecs, etc., as opposed to ASICs) or chip sets. In many cases, chips are considered mixed-signal because of the partitioning of functionality or process technology among the components of a chip set, particularly in telecommunications applications.
For some companies, having mixed-signal design and fabrication capabilities can be a major contributor to achieving corporate goals. Mixed-signal capabilities provide the means to fulfill National Semiconductor Corp.'s goal of "becoming a broad-range supplier of 'systems on a chip,' " said Mark Levy, vice president of corporate communications and marketing at the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company.
Texas Instruments Inc.'s $600 million 1996 acquisition of mass-storage chip maker Silicon Systems Inc. brought additional mixed-signal capability to TI's arsenal. TI, in addition to using its mixed-signal capability to produce chip sets for wireless communications applications (which last year brought in approximately $500 million, or 6% of the company's 1996 component revenue), will concentrate on custom mixed-signal ICs as well as specialized DSP cores, according to senior vice president Del Whitaker, who manages mixed-signal product lines for Dallas-based TI.
IC companies' ability to design and manufacture mixed-signal devices - coupled with the fact that very few applications are all-digital or all-analog - is causing the institution of "vertical" marketing efforts aimed at specific end-use segments. Both National and TI have established wireless communications marketing efforts.
One of National's products approaching the systems-on-a-chip goal and employing mixed-signal technology is the LMX3161 single-chip DECT radio for handset and base-station applications.
Mixed-signal capability is vital for the communications market, said Chris Tubis, National's director of wireless communications. "The integration of the phase-locked loop with the rest of the radio in the LMX3161 is a big achievement."
TI's wireless communications business unit is also proceeding with "standard" mixed-signal ICs, such as the TCM8030 single-chip audio and data baseband processor that supports all the worldwide standards for analog cellular telephone transmission. The device combines two existing baseband chips - an analog device for voice processing and a digital device for data processing - into one low-power, mixed-signal CMOS chip.
Kevin Scott, business manager for data converters at Maxim Integrated Products Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., thinks of the product lines that he manages as mixed-signal, and contends that the definition is truly vendor-dependent.
Scott cites a product Maxim expects to release in July - the MAX125/126, a 14-bit, simultaneous-sampling A/D converter for power-factor correction, three-phase motor control, and similar industrial applications. The device has fault-protected inputs up to 16 V and a plus/minus 5-V supply, plus an on-chip 4 x 14 RAM buffer and an on-chip microsequencer.
Another example of a mixed-signal standard product is Microchip Technology Inc.'s PIC14000 programmable controller, which integrates an 8-bit RISC processor core with A/D and D/A converters, memory, a high-speed serial port, a temperature sensor, a clock oscillator, and voltage-regulator control. The Chandler, Ariz.-based company's device can be used to control battery charging or monitor battery status, or for real-time measurement and control of temperature, pressure, light intensity, and other variables.
Two-year-old Marvell Semiconductor Inc. offers high-performance read-channel ICs for use in hard drives. The mixed-signal devices, implemented in a "mainstream" 0.5-micron CMOS process, are designed for leading-edge partial-response, maximum-likelihood (PRML) drives.
Using a pure CMOS technology produces smaller die and higher yields than BiCMOS, said Pantas Sutarddja, vice president of engineering with Marvell, Sunnyvale. "Thus, Marvell is in a better position to meet price expectations than some BiCMOS chip competitors," he said.
In what could be construed as an "unmixed signal" product, Micro Linear Corp.'s ML6694 Fast Ethernet transceiver chip claims an improvement over previous physical-layer (PHY) chips, because it eliminates what the company calls the "excess baggage" of digital functions that are included in recent-generation Fast Ethernet controllers.
This approach helps bring down the price of the Fast Ethernet connection, because "the problem is being attacked on two fronts - analog and digital - allowing transceiver companies like Micro Linear to optimize the design of high-speed analog circuits while the digital companies focus on the controller circuits," said Jason Knickerbocker, product marketing manager with the San Jose company.
Linear-IC makers are designing products for other high-speed networking applications, such as ISDN. SGS-Thomson Microelectronics' STLC5444 is designed to reduce board size and complexity by integrating four digital telephone line feeder circuits on one chip. The part reduces the cost of ISDN board development because all feeding functions are integrated, according to the company.
Some of the emerging markets that linear-IC makers are banking on are not yet sure things. One example is Personal Communications Services (PCS). Nevertheless, RF device makers see opportunities in the PCS market.
Anadigics Inc., a Warren, N.J.-based maker of gallium arsenide chips, recently introduced what it claims is the industry's first dual-mode, dual-band power amp device. The part supports 800-MHz AMPS/D-AMPS (Advanced Mobile Phone Service) cellular and PCS 1.9-GHz Time Division Multiple Access transmitter applications.
Betting on ADSL
ADSL technology, which must be in place at both the home or office end in a PC modem, and at the telephone company central office end in a compatible modem, allows simultaneous voice and high-rate data transmission over existing twisted-pair copper telephone wires. ADSL can bring data into the home or office (downstream) at very high rates - theoretically up to 6 Mbits/s - while data rates from the home or office (upstream) are in the 640-Kbit/s range, hence the "asymmetric" designation.
Alcatel Telecom, Analog Devices Inc., GlobeSpan Technologies Inc. (formerly the Advanced Transmission Technology Unit of AT&T Paradyne), Motorola Inc., and Texas Instruments are either supplying or plan to supply devices for ADSL modems.
There are two main ADSL modulation schemes: carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation and discrete multitone (DMT) technology. Most suppliers offer chip sets for DMT, which has been accepted by the American National Standards Institute's T1E1.4 committee. GlobeSpan is the only supplier of a chip set for the CAP scheme.
Burr-Brown Corp., Tucson, Ariz., recently announced its DRV1100, which is designed to be integrated with GlobeSpan's ADSL, rate-adaptive DSL, and high-bit-rate DSL systems. The DRV1100 operates off a single 5-V supply, which eliminates the need for multiple power supplies required by upstream drivers.
Analog Devices, Norwood, Mass., introduced its AD20msp910 ADSL chip set last year. But Rupert Baines, product manager for ADSL products, sees the next 20 months or so as "more trials and experimentation, and then in late '98 we'll see the curve picking up. In '99 and 2000 is when it really gets going. Several issues still need to be worked out, even with the CAP vs. DMT debate somewhat settled."
Baines ticked off some critical issues on which the industry is working: What is the protocol? How do we cope with all those megabits (within the telephone system)? What backbone do we use? How do we handle all that traffic?
Nevertheless, Analog Devices is aggressively marketing its ADSL chip set, which is a complete solution, including a communications controller, Baines said.
Motorola offers its CopperGold technology, represented by an ADSL single-chip, protocol-independent transceiver that the company claims is capable of communicating at 8 Mbits/s in one direction and up to 1 Mbit/s in both directions over standard phone lines.
Jacques Issa, market development manager for Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector in Plano, Texas, said Motorola's system designers partitioned the ADSL system into a single transceiver, a line driver, and a host controller.
Issa agrees with Analog Devices' Baines about protocols being an open question. "With options wide open for protocols, a general-purpose and programmable communications controller is a perfect fit to complement the ADSL system," he said. The MPC860, for instance, is a dual RISC processor design, with the first engine included in a Communications Processor Module (CPM) and the other being the PowerPC core. The CPM handles all communications protocols and buffer descriptors, while the four SCC channels run multiple protocols, ranging from HDLC to ATM.
The two approaches - Analog Devices' and Motorola's - offer a choice for design engineers. Analog Devices' is close to being a "baked cake," complete with software, while Motorola's allows (or requires, depending on point of view) the customer to develop software. The popularity of each approach will become evident as the infant ADSL market grows between now and the end of the century.
Copyright r 1997 CMP Media Inc.
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