Analysis on the development trend of three IC design differentiation

Since the invention of the first integrated circuit from 1958 to now, IC has gone through more than more than 50 years of history, with the rapid development of semiconductor technology, the integration of billions of transistors in an integrated circuit is not difficult, for designers, the difficulty is how to make their own IC differentiation, to the system manufacturers to bring more benefits , here, combined with the practice of leading semiconductor manufacturers, summed up three IC design trend of differentiation.

1, High integration

Because the change of IC package is much slower than the development of IC technology, therefore, with the development of technology, many manufacturers choose to use high integration to achieve differentiation, this leader of the enterprise has Ti, Qualcomm, Bo Tong, MTK and so on, to achieve high integration, a key condition is that the company must have a large number of IP reserves, and have mature experience accumulation, in this way, through high integration so that their products in size, power consumption and cost of leading rivals, and then through the packaging to form a differentiation, for example, TI recently launched the five Integrated wilink™8.0 product line, with a 45nm single chip solution integrates five different radios, the wi-fi®, GNSS, NFC, Bluetooth (Bluetooth®) and FM integration on one chip, the Wilink 8.0 architecture supports the various combinations of these technologies to help tailor the solution to fully meet the unique requirements and price point requirements of all mobile markets. Each different chip not only adopts the compact WSP package which can be directly installed on the PCB, but also integrates all the RF front-end, complete power management system and comprehensive and comprehensive coexistence mechanism. At the system level, compared with the traditional multi-chip products, the five-in-wilink 8.0 chip can reduce the cost by 60%, the size is reduced 45%, the power consumption is reduced by 30%.

Bo Tong is also a high integration of experts, such as its new BCM53600 series is currently the world's highest level of integrated 1G EPON single chip system (SoC), the switch, PHY, CPU, EPON MAC, voice DSP, 5 devices to integrate the functions of a single device, Also included is the Software Development Kit (SDK), which greatly reduces system cost and power consumption.

Other manufacturers such as NXP, by integrating more interfaces to the MCU to achieve the difference, in the arm core MCU also formed its own differentiation characteristics, but also a few choice, but play high integration is a certain threshold, one is to have a large number of mature IP, and also have their own patented technology, And this type of product coverage of the larger user base, this model for large-scale IC design companies to play.

2. Modularization of Chip

With the development of technology, IC size is becoming smaller, some manufacturers choose to use modularity to achieve differentiation, such as village fields, the advantages of their own MLCC technology and wireless technology, the introduction of the small size of the Bluetooth WiFi module, these modules by the Apple mobile phone. In addition, in view of the current trend of medical electronic portability, village field also launched for medical electronic data transmission of the BLE (low-power Bluetooth) module and improve the quality of life of the anion generator module, the negative ion generator structure compact and efficient, is the industry's largest number of ion production of a product, in order to make the product more modular, More easily embedded in the device, the village field to the ion generator and drive power to connect together.

Fig. 1 Work demonstration of negative ion generator

At the 2012 Shanghai Electronic Exhibition in Munich, the village Field Company will display the product at the scene, and visitors will be able to see the effect.

Another example of Chip modularity is the power supply module, Vicor Company's power module is the use of its Picor company's power management IC to enhance the Power module competitive advantage, Picor recently launched with intelligent function Hot plug/circuit Breaker Controller Cool Switch, This product protects the MOSFET by simulating the transient thermal performance of the MOSFET. For proper control, start-up and thermal cycling to ensure safe operating restrictions under any load conditions, this innovative protection program will also be exhibited at the 2012 Shanghai Electronics Show in Munich, where you can learn more.

The above chip modular example to our inspiration is that IC manufacturers can consider the modular way to provide more value to the system manufacturers?

3, with custom chip to deal with "software differentiation" homogenization

Chinese idioms called "overkill", using it to describe the current electronic industry on the value of software differentiation is the most appropriate---from the first focus on hardware design to the current large tilt to the software of each company to talk about their own software engineers ratio, the difference in software is a bit too skewed, which leads to "software differentiation" Homogenization---Many companies to understand software differentiation is limited to the redesign of the UI, through the software to achieve a large number of functions, which increased the workload of software engineers, on the other hand, the main control hardware burden, but affected some user experience. So, how to achieve differentiated design? How to balance the function of hardware and software?

The industry's view is to use customized chips to the system manufacturers of some of the key IP into a single chip, so that not only to help system manufacturers to solve the software workload also formed a differentiation, such as LSI axxia communication processor, system manufacturers can achieve very free customization. For example, in the following AXM2502 processor, LSI utilizes virtual pipeline technology to arbitrarily increase the functionality and interface required by system vendors in the chip, achieving great flexibility and differentiation.

Figure 2 AXM2502 processor