Ostrich with his head in the sand....
At least you could have dug up the Fortune article (Gilder Report)
to actually see what it said rather than dismissing it so bluntly.
We shall see who is the "Poor guy no clues". I tried to be non-offensive in my post. Pity you could not do the same. Do your own research. Good-bye.
The following is for other VTSS investors who might want to know some recent developments in SiGe. I'm sorry to bring this up but you'd rather investigate this now than find out too late. My apologies to others on this thread.
Electronic Engineering Times
January 26, 1998
IBM leads charge to SiGe production -- Surge in foundry activity
threatens GaAs's role in RF
by Anthony Cataldo and Ron Wilson
Fishkill, N.Y. - Running one step ahead of an avalanche, IBM Microelectronics
is driving its silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction transistor technology
into production through an unprecedented network of foundry relationships. By
licensing powerful players in the RF- and communications-IC industries, the
computer giant has spread its SiGe BiCMOS process far beyond the walls of
IBM-and may have sown the undoing of gallium arsenide (GaAs) as an RF
technology.
IBM's SiGe process adds 65-GHz SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistors to a
relatively stock 0.4-micron CMOS formula. The combination permits integration of
RF front ends with intermediate-frequency, control-logic and, eventually,
baseband circuitry to produce single-chip radios, network interfaces and the
like. In communications, it permits the integration of extremely high-speed
signal paths with switching logic. And in computing, the applications remain
mostly unexplored but are open-ended.
IBM developed the SiGe BiCMOS process at its facility here, where it has a
capacity of 600 wafers a month. The process is being transferred to a production
line in Burlington, Vt., in a move that will raise capacity by about a factor of
five.
Simultaneously, IBM has licensed a number of other companies to use the
process, its libraries and some megacells.
"There are about five of us licensees ," said Chris Henningsen, director of
marketing at Harris Semiconductor. "Each one has paid a pretty steep membership
fee. There are Harris, Hughes Networking, National Semiconductor, NorTel and
Tektronix, plus one company that has not been named publicly."
Each has its own uses for the technology. Harris, according to Henningsen, is
targeting a major reduction in the chip count for PCS telephone handsets and
similar digital-radio devices. National Semiconductor is also pursuing RF
integration. Hughes is working on networking chips and NorTel on high- speed
switching equipment.
IBM itself has produced a number of important cells in the RF area, including
multiplex/demux, D/A conversion and A/D conversion. The company plans to market
at least some of the cells in standard-product ICs later this year.
"The standard products aren't coming quite as fast as advertised, so IBM
needs some good partners," said Fred Zieber, president of Pathfinder Research
(San Jose, Calif.). "IBM can do the manufacturing, but they're slim in terms of
marketing because they haven't made a full transition to a merchant company.
"And this is not computer-related. This is mixed-signal and analog, and
that's something with which they haven't had internal expertise."
IBM and its partners won't be alone in the market for long. Contenders in
Japan, North America and Europe are readying the technology for production,
either unilaterally or through licensing arrangements with Canadian startup SiGe
Microsystems (see sidebar). The flurry of activity is a strong indication that
SiGe has moved well past the R&D labs and into the product- planning phase.
Speed boost
At its core, silicon germanium involves speeding circuit frequencies by
adding small amounts of germanium to bipolar junction transistors. Today,
that's done using ultra-high-speed vacuum chemical vapor deposition about
two-thirds of the way through the manufacturing process.
IBM claims it can achieve a 65-GHz fmax, compared with 15 to 25 GHz for the
fastest silicon -only transistors.
"In a nutshell, SiGe improves bipolar to the point where there's no
discrepancy in performance compared with GaAs , with the cost structure of VLSI
silicon, " said Derek Houghton, president of SiGe Microsystems (Ottawa), which
was spun off from the Canadian National Research Council 18 months ago. "Going
forward, there will be more emphasis on system-on-a-chip, where the RF is
brought onto CMOS. That's where we're heading."
The potential impact of the technology is illustrated in the performance of
IBM's cells and in licensee Harris' plans.
"The test group here developed multiplexer/demux circuitry that runs at 5
GHz-twice as fast as any commercial GaAs device, at half the power," claimed
Paul Cunningham, IBM Microelectronics product-line manager. "On the mixed-
signal side, we have a 10-bit D/A and a 6-bit A/D in the fab now. The A/D looks
like it will perform 8 Gsamples/s. The device actually simulates out much faster
than that, but we are making an allowance for package losses."
While IBM will focus on a few standard products and a lot of custom work with
specific customers, Harris is taking aim directly at the PCS phone market.
"Today, what we can clearly do is put together the antenna front-end
circuits-the low-noise amplifier and power amp-and the up- and down- converters
on a single die," Henningsen said. "The IF, demodulator and filters could
potentially go there as well.
"In addition, in an average handset design there are about 200 passive
components of various types, mostly resistors and non-critical capacitors, that
are relatively straightforward to integrate in this process. By sweeping those
up, we can convert about 200 pieces and $45 in cost to about 40 pieces and $14."
While the short-term aim of IBM and Harris is improved power and integration
over current GaAs RF devices, the stakes will grow much higher. Both consider
the SiGe BiCMOS process a major step toward the direct- conversion receiver:
That is, they are developing a receiver that converts directly from an RF analog
signal to a baseband digital one, without IF stages.
"For the consumer market, direct conversion is something we want to do and
something we are researching now," Henningsen said. "Our gurus call it the holy
grail of RF design."
"I personally believe that SiGe can do direct conversion," said IBM's
Cunningham. "The big question is power."
Henningsen agreed. "Zero-IF direct conversion certainly makes sense up
through 1.9 GHz. And I think we see a path to 2.4 GHz. But 3 to 5 GHz-we're not
sure how to do that yet.
"But even when it's possible, there are perception problems. People have
tried it in the past, and it hasn't worked, so you have to convince them again.
And frankly, in the PCS market it's not a make-or-break issue right now. We are
talking about eliminating $4 to $5 in cost by taking out the IF stages. That's
small stuff compared with integrating a lot of the passive components and the
RF/IF."
Another opportunity the SiGe process opens for Harris is in dual-band,
800/1,900-MHz phones. "If you do a dual-band phone, you have a difficult
challenge on power consumption if you have to do dual front-ends," Henningsen
said. "With SiGe, we can cover both bands with a single chip."
Similar impacts will show up in communications. NorTel is reportedly working
on very fast crosspoint switch arrays. "In the wireline area, there is a lot of
ground to be explored in the area above OC-48," Cunningham said.
Process particulars
IBM has developed its process essentially as an added module to an existing
BiCMOS pro-cess. The company uses a patented low-temperature film epitaxy step,
operating below 800C, to form the heterojunction transistors.
The amount of germanium in the junction area has been a critical issue,
according to Cunningham. "As the amount of Ge increases, you have to stay below
the Matthews and Blakely limit," or the device becomes unstable.
"But if you look at the entire process, compared with our standard silicon
BiCMOS, there is very little added complexity," Cunningham said.
Henningsen said the process has come up smoothly at Harris as well. "We
already had a BiCMOS process," he said, "and the SiGe has come up with no
problems at all."
The sudden surge of development in SiGe could be the writing on the wall for
GaAs. SiGe designers say that they get all of the individual transistor speed of
GaAs, but with far less noise, much higher uniformity of performance across a
wafer, much greater thermal conductivity and a far better cost structure.
Those comparisons have led SiGe proponents to predict that the technology
will eventually drive GaAs into an ultra-high-speed niche. GaAs is still too
difficult for many companies to master because of the inherent instability of
arsenic, which causes threshold voltages to vary across the wafers, lowering
yields. GaAs devices are also generally produced on older, 4-inch- wafer
production lines.
"Unlike silicon, a high percentage of the cost for GaAs is the wafer
itself, " said Zieber of Pathfinder Research. "One of the potential promises
with SiGe is that you can get the cost down. You can imagine a lot of wireless-
communications things if the cost is low enough."
February 12, 1998
IBM GETS INTO WIRELESS COMMS WITH $ 180M COMMQUEST BUY
IBM Corp is paying $ 180m for wireless semiconductor company CommQuest
Technologies Inc to vault it into the market for next- generation devices which
will combine email, phone, internet access and global positioning functions. IBM
expects CommQuest to generate $ 1bn new revenues for it by 2002. IBM
Microelectronics, where CommQuest's 215 staff, most of them engineers, will be
housed, will build CommQuest's designs in SiGe silicon germanium using its
CMOS 7S copper process. IBM says it's getting around 100 starts of the SiGe
process per day at its Burlington, Vermont fab and expects to ship production
quality parts by mid-year in sizes between 0.22 and 0.25 microns. IBM has
eschewed GaAs gallium arsenide technology in favor of SiGe for next generation
low-power ASICs and semiconductors claiming chips using it are two or three
cheaper to produce and can accommodate more transistors. IBM says it needed to
make only small changes to its regular CMOS process to produce SiGe chips at
speeds up to 100GHz and can get the same yields from the process as it does for
other chips. GaAs manufacturers earlier this week cut prices of their chips to
between $ 7 and $ 10. CommQuest already designs a range of chips for a
'worldphone,' all-band GSM mobile phones, CDMA and global positioning devices
and other wireless systems. Its next- generation designs will be integrated
'system-on-chip' parts for processing mixed digital and analog signals,
essentially programmable ASICs. It's waiting for TDMA standards to emerge before
building parts for that wireless market. IBM Microelectronics will supply the
technology to other Big Blue divisions - though didn't say whether IBM itself
will brand the multi-application devices - but its main revenue will come from
OEM sales, which are currently around $ 3bn. IBM's only previous interest in the
wireless market has been selling foundry services to the likes of Nortel and
Hughes. IBM won't be developing and selling voice handsets using the CommQuest
intellectual property. IBM says it expects to press SiGe into use in more
mainstream processors in future. It thinks SiGe will extend Moore's Law so that
it applies when transistor sizes reach 0.1 microns and below. All of CommQuests
chip designs will be fabricated by IBM. IBM will take a one-time charge in the
quarter the deal closes.
February 12, 1998
NEC Develops 10GB Integrated Circuit
NEC, one of Japan's representative high-tech enterprises, has
developed a ten-gigabit per second synchronous multi-separation integrated
circuit (DMUX) for use in basic light-transmission equipment using silicon
germanium bipolar transistors, that can be mass produced on a ceramic metal
oxide semiconductor production line. The newly-developed circuit provides
stable and high-speed signal processing even with the increased compactness of
the circuit and elements numbering over 1,000. In addition, the energy
consumption of the integrated circuit has been reduced to 1.8 watts, the
equivalent of about 60% of the electrical consumption of conventional chemical
compound circuits. The development is expected to lead to increased compactness
and decreased electrical consumption of ten gigabit per second high-speed light
transmission equipment, which is just about to be introduced on the market.
February 10, 1998
Hitachi Announces World's Fastest IC
Hitachi has developed a silicon-germanium bipolar element which
boasts a cutoff frequency and a maximum oscillator frequency of 100GHz. This
could be used for developing components with maximum operating speeds of 50GHz.
Hitachi has already fashioned six types of ICs. The element was made from a
heterojunction bipolar transistor using silicon-germanium in the base layer.
The emitter measures 0.14 micrometers wide. The germanium doping ratio is
varied in the base layer in order to accelerate electrons moving toward the base
junction. This graded structure enabled raising the cutoff frequency, which is
a critical parameter for high-speed digital circuits. The parasitic capacity of
the transistor was also reduced below the usual level of 2/3. All electrodes
were plated with tungsten in order to reduce the parasitic resistance. The
element was used to make a ring oscillator; the transmission delay was cut to
50% of the conventional value, at 8 picoseconds. |
