Jim,
Lucent is also a major chip manufacturer and below is their SoC design philosopy. Allentown is only 55 miles away from King Of Prussia and Lucent's evolving coopetitive stance towards small companies and startups are only now becoming more visible with the way that the likes of JDSU, SDLI and many others are capturing the percentage of manufacturing being outsourced by the keepers and enforcers of the Bellcore standards that itself are evolving to cope with tremendous growth of data vis-a-vis voice on wireline and wireless networks. The moving balance seems to be around 30% but demand exceeds supply so capacity is constantly being expanded.
"SOC is our default approach but we aren't religious about this," declares Mark Pinto, semiconductor business unit manager at Lucent Technologies Inc. in Allentown, Pa. "We put as much on one chip as possible and use multi-chip for incompatible functions, or as backup strategies."
"SOC makes sense," he says, "where the device can be pure CMOS--including functions like IF or RF, and RAM,--and so long as chip-size and performance requirements are appropriate."
But some functions are difficult, if not impossible, to integrate, Pinto notes. "Optoelectronics, for example, demands gallium arsenide rather than Silicon. And you can integrate flash, but it's costly. What you need for a successful SOC," he says, "is vanilla CMOS."
One class of product that rarely will be integrated, Pinto says, is power. Because these devices dissipate a lot of heat, SOC packaging grows bulky and expensive, offsetting SOC's cost and size advantages, he notes.
Lucent designs programmable logic in SOCs. One example is a V.90 packet radio SOC for GSM. This chip includes a DSP, microprocessor, flash, SRAM, A-to-D conversion, embedded debugging, as well as analog functions. But the heart of the design is 120,000 programmable gates where the OEM can store his own bit stream, tailoring the SOC to specific applications. Lucent also offers FPGAs in SOCs.
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Check out how flip chips, which up to this point have only been used in aerospace and microprocessors -- Pentium III (laminates) and Athlon (ceramics) -- fit in the power part of the mobile equation. MSCC has some interesting literature on the subject and arguably the smallest flip chips in the industry. |
