Clearly there is a real and growing demand for mixed-signal devices.  Technology advances are ensuring high-performance analog-rich designs can be fabricated more cost effectively.  The inexorable shift to smaller geometries on standard digital CMOS processes has encouraged more foundries to exploit still-viable, larger nodes for mixed-signal processes.  Meanwhile, other foundries, entirely focused on mixed-signal, are developing new BiCMOS, RF CMOS and SiGe processes.  Production capacity and process choice for mixed signal devices is increasing to meet growing demand.  Variations for low power, low voltage, high voltage and high frequency provide plenty of choice for the discerning mixed signal device … Read More → "Mixing it Right for Mixed Signal"

We take a lot for granted in this world. When we got here, stuff was more or less just working. We’ve managed to bend a lot of that to our will since then, and we’ve done so by mastering a wide variety of reliable physical laws. We’ve managed to destroy some of it (and threaten to destroy more) often because we have not yet mastered yet more of those laws (or because someone could make a quick buck, but that’s a different topic). We live in a universe that has the … Read More → "At the Dawn of the Universe"

From the day we are old enough to articulate polysyllabisms, we are fascinated with big numbers. The concept of “big,” of course, being relative. Some older cultures are thought to have had three quantifiers: one, two, and many. Which is suggested in the resemblance between the French words for “three” (trois) and “very” (très). (Here you have to think the real old Europe.)

But we’ve moved beyond that. Way beyond that. Why, in my day, a million dollars was a lot of money. Being a millionaire meant … Read More → "That’s with a “B”"

Back in the dark ages, when I first moved into the semiconductor realm, I used to compare the process geometries with the thickness of a human hair – which caused gasps of disbelief in a lay audience. Holding up a four-inch wafer of 16K SRAMS alongside a transistor can with its three wires, then explaining the many hundreds of thousands of can equivalents that were contained in the wafer, usually also caused gasps.

At a recent presentation I heard Kelin Kuhn, an Intel Fellow and a dynamic speaker, explain that a 32nm memory cell was dwarfed by … Read More → "Taming Variability"