Bandwidth looms as key issue for ISSCC confab
By Ron Wilson
EE Times
(11/06/98, 1:40 p.m. EDT)
SAN FRANCISCO — The 1999 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), to be held next February, will explore facets of the perplexing pursuit of bandwidth in the search to slake the unquenchable thirst of a media-laden culture.
Process advances will highlight the conference in San Francisco, as a special joint session will outline the coming-of-age of commercial silicon-on-insulator (SOI) processes. IBM Microelectronics, for example, will describe PowerPC 603 and 750 processors retargeted directly from bulk CMOS to an implanted-oxygen-layer SOI process. The company will report performance gains of up to 30 percent from the process change alone, without any re-optimization of circuits.
Similarly, Samsung Semiconductor will describe a 600-MHz Alpha processor and a low-power 16-Mbit DRAM, both implemented in their own SOI process.
Battling DRAMs
Memory papers will also reflect the bandwidth quest, with an intense battle heating up between rival dual-data-rate, Synclink and Direct Rambus DRAM interfaces. Other papers will report increases in both the size and speed of embedded memory, with the pack led by a 1.5-Mbyte, 1.8-ns on-chip cache on the latest version of Hewlett-Packard Co.'s PA-RISC 8500 CPU, with 140 million transistors.
With processors and memory accelerating, communications links are racing to keep up. Advanced digital-subscriber-line hardware will attract the majority of attention, with five papers on high-linearity, low-noise xDSL front-end chips, and a million-transistor, single-chip 52-Mbit/second QAM modem.
The communications industry will also mine new process possibilities. As RF designers begin to view silicon germanium as a mainstream alternative, the result will be BiCMOS processes with high CMOS logic density and 50-GHz speeds.
But circuit innovations will play their own role at the conference. Level One Communications Inc. will describe a single-chip, direct-conversion transceiver for 900-MHz spread-spectrum digital cordless handsets.
In perhaps the most unusual paper of the conference, a University of Michigan researcher will describe the use of micromechanical beams as variable air-gap capacitors. By varying the bias voltage on the beam, the air gap between beam and baseplate can be changed, varying the capacitance on an inherently high-Q capacitor and producing tunable bandpass filters.
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