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TI tips plans for 0.15-micron process and products
By David Lammers and Rick Boyd-Merritt
DALLAS - Texas Instruments Inc. has revealed details of its process-technology road map and product directions as the semiconductor giant reshapes itself into a company focused on digital signal processors.
In a series of interviews here and in Houston, executives said process technology will take ASIC capability below 0.20 micron next year, as the company - driven by a belief in a yet-unproven VLIW architecture - scouts DSP applications in such areas as smart, third-generation cellular phones and digital TVs.
TI is ramping its 0.21-micron (drawn) logic process now, and two of about a dozen commercial designs are in mass-production here. It will be nearly a year before the next-generation, 0.18-micron (drawn) process is at a similar stage, though commercial ASIC customers will undertake beta designs in the fourth quarter. TI will use the process for its standard-logic product development.
TI will start with 0.18-micron design rules when it goes into production with the new architecture in mid-1999, and then will shift to 0.15 micron when 193-nm argon-fluoride excimer steppers become available later next year, said Peter Rickert, ASIC-technology platform manager.
The new process will double ASIC gate-packing density, delivering 75,000 gates/mm2, said Scott F. Eisenhart, ASIC-product architecture manager. The 0.18/0.15-micron GS30 architecture will have a fully contacted M1 (first metal layer) pitch of 0.49 micron; pitch will be 0.56 micron for M2, 3 and 4, based on 0.22-micron-drawn lines.
Texas Instruments has been aggressive about using low-k dielectric materials since1995, when it began using Dow Corning Corp's HSQ spin-on dielectric, which has a k value of 3.2. Eisenhart said TI currently offers a "sandwich" metallization scheme, with copper-doped aluminum wires and titanium vias. By the end of next year, the company expects to offer copper interconnects, a lower-k dielectric material and 0.15-micron line widths. The new process will allow DSPs to approach 500 MHz, though that has yet to be proven in silicon.
Given today's emphasis on cost reductions across many markets, copper probably will be used only by the relatively few customers willing to pay for performance, Eisenhart said. Cu-doped aluminum wires will meet the needs of most customers.
Also, the high cost of embedded DRAM means that relatively few customers will opt for that technology, in TI's view. Dave Shepard, worldwide marketing director for ASIC products, said the densities possible with SRAM cores are able to meet the on-chip memory needs of nearly all of TI's customers, with none of the performance degradation involved when DRAM and logic processes are merged.
Many of TI's cost-sensitive customers in the disk-drive and cell-phone markets are looking to the next-generation process mainly for its ability to shrink die sizes.
Customers will be able to start beta designs in the fourth quarter, using a set of TI-developed back-end tools optimized to prevent electromigration and signal-integrity problems.
The first version of the GS20 0.18-micron architecture - now in production - offers 36,000 gates/mm2. The move to the next-generation architecture, GS30, will more than double the gate density, supporting on-chip SRAM densities up to 250,000 bits/mm2 at 0.18-micron rules and higher when the shift to 0.15 micron occurs.
Performance will increase from 65 ps at 1.8 V in the first version to 48-ps gate-switching speeds for the 0.15-micron version.
The new capabilities are being announced at a time when TI is seeking new high-end applications for its DSPs beyond the cost-sensitive sockets they fill today in modems, hard drives and cellular phones. "There are a lot of end equipment areas we are working on that we haven't been public about," said Tom Engibous, TI's chief executive officer. "We have a number of teams working on everything from print technology to communications and the consumer space. We see the living room going digital, starting with digital still cameras, digital VCRs, digital camcorders and digital TVs."
Engibous sketched out such concepts as programmable DSPs, more powerful than anything TI currently offers, that could be used to decode digital cable-, satellite- or terrestrial-TV broadcasts. "There isn't a DSP out there that meets these requirements," he said. "You see all these multimedia processors trying to do TV-like functions . . . that's our play, if we can get the chip out quickly."
Gene Frantz, a senior fellow with TI's DSP group, confirmed the company has launched a DTV project at its Dallas headquarters but declined to give details. "We are in the process of trying to find our direction here," said Frantz, who added that TV makers still seek low-cost, hard-coded solutions and that DTV-product concepts are still evolving.
A separate group is pursuing a nascent class of third-generation cellular phones that would be capable of hosting multimedia services and data rates up to 2 Mbits/second. Such phones, conforming to an emerging IMT-2000 standard being developed by the ITU, will be deployed in the fourth quarter of 2000 in Japan, which means some components will have to be ready as early as next year.
"I think the industry understands the algorithms required here, but the jury is still out" on which architecture TI will use to attack the market, said Michael McMahan, director of R&D for TI's wireless communications group.
TI may have to reach for an architecture beyond its high-end C6X DSPs to serve digital TVs or broadband mobile phones. That will drive the company still deeper into the very long-instruction-word (VLIW) architectures it is already pioneering with the C6X.
"No VLIW architecture has been successful to date, but longer term I believe VLIW will win more high-performance DSP applications than any other architecture," said Engibous. "I'll be frank: We were worried about [using VLIW in the C6X], because if your compiler is not great the whole thing dies. But our feedback on the C6X is promising."
TI needs the VLIW-based C6X to be a success and pave the way to new high-end applications. In its most recent financial quarter, TI's profits fell to $142 million, down about a third from the year-earlier period, while revenue declined to $2.17 billion, 15 percent below the same period last year.
Contributing to the company's woes have been relatively weak markets for some of its DSP products. "The 56-k [modem] market is pretty saturated, and it hasn't taken off as aggressively as a lot of people including ourselves thought," said Engibous. "We thought the world would roll to 56k like they rolled to every other new modem speed. Whether it was the confusion over standards or the fact you don't get a lot of the time, I don't know."
The eventual move to xDSL and cable modems could revive the modem portion of the DSP business. But on a day when the stock market plunged nearly 300 points, Engibous said he sees no near-term recovery from the depressed economies in Asia that have driven the electronics industry into a recession this year.
"I just came back from a week in Asia, and they are not very optimistic over there about a fast turnaround," he said. "They are talking about several years" before a recovery.
The TI chief said that he and his counterparts in the semiconductor world have little real visibility into when the industry will pull back up, but he expressed confidence that the fundamental health of the communications sector ultimately will drive an upturn.
The semiconductor industry is in "a can't-know situation right now," said Engibous. "On the other hand, the demand for communications electronics has been about as dynamic as anything since the PC, and that's holding up a lot of the electronics market now. It's holding up the semiconductor industry now."
Engibous dismissed the idea that the company - which has shed its notebook-computer, defense and DRAM units over the past 18 months - plans further cutbacks. "I wouldn't be surprised if the industry sees a couple years of mediocre growth," he added. "But TI is in a good position, from a company standpoint, to see a couple years of pretty slow growth continue. If we are going to be in a period of uncertainty like we are in, we are at least in good shape for it, compared with the last period like this."
While Engibous continues to define TI as a DSP company, he noted TI's mixed-signal business is in fact twice the size of its DSP business. And he said he hopes to expand TI's portfolio of standard products.
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