By: Gary Dagastine

Since the invention of the transistor, breathtaking advances in semiconductor technology have driven the evolution of computing and communications along a path from centralized mainframes and minicomputers, to networked PCs, to sophisticated mobile devices that can connect to networks at any time from anywhere.

Yet as impressive as these achievements have been, they represent only the beginning of the contributions semiconductors will make to society. Their real impact is yet to come because while there are already billions of internet-connected devices in the world, a much greater number will be connected globally in the next few years for applications such as autonomous vehicles, the Internet of Things (IoT) and many others.

They will require an extensive infrastructure to connect, transmit, process, act upon and store all of the resulting data. Building an infrastructure that can enable such “connected intelligence” is a huge ongoing task that will require so many semiconductors relying on so many technologies, that it’s fair to say a golden era is dawning for the industry.

That was the perspective given recently by GLOBALFOUNDRIES CEO Sanjay Jha and Sr. Vice President and General Manager of Fab 8 Tom Caulfield, in keynote talks at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai and SEMICON West trade shows, respectively.

Their talks were focused on describing this new era of connected intelligence, how it is changing the requirements and conditions for success in the foundry segment, and how GF is making it possible.

Jha spoke about how the explosion of data is leading to a  connected intelligence inter-relationship among data centers, networks and client devices (i.e., smartphones, IoT devices, etc.). He described how GF is in a leadership position to enable it, both with regard to GF’s suite of leading-edge technologies and in terms of the company’s business strategies, such as the building of a new 300mm fab in Chengdu, China for 22FDX®-based products.

“The last 10 years in this industry have probably been the most transformative in our lives,” he said. “One example is that our phones have become an extension of our minds. Another, from a social perspective, is that Facebook now has almost 2 billion monthly users. Considering that China has about 1.4 billion people, the Facebook community is now larger than any other.”

At MWC Shanghai, CEO Sanjay Jha was a keynote speaker and part of a panel speaking on the topic of “Industry & The Human Element”

“I believe the next 10 years is going to be a golden era for the foundry business,” he said. “Industry estimates suggest that by 2025 we will be using 163 zettabytes of data (one zettabyte = 250 billion DVDs). We are collecting, transporting and analyzing all of this information – both at the edge with client devices for real-time decision-making and in the data center for longer-term insight gathering. Semiconductors are the enabling technology.”

Jha believes this transformation is changing the conditions for success in the semiconductor industry – both in terms of technologies and customer engagement models.

Regarding technologies, he described how GF’s dual roadmap of FDX™ technology for battery-powered devices and FinFET technology for high-performance processing in data centers and high-end computing devices is unique, and allows the company to match the right technology with the right application.

When coupled with the company’s legacy of leadership in RF, its new silicon photonics technologies for connectivity, and differentiated ASIC and analog/power technologies, GF is in a unique position to drive progress across the full breadth of new applications in the years ahead.

Regarding engagement models, Jha used China as an example, saying that, “The country is moving from a ‘Made in China’ stage of industry to an ‘Innovated in China’ position, and our Chengdu fab is a strategic, long-term joint venture partnership with the Chengdu government that is conceived in that light. It will be central to our IoT and 5G technologies, and when complete it will be the largest fab in China, with a building half a kilometer long.” Click here to view Sanjay Jha’s presentation.

At SEMICON West, Caulfield said that ever since Gordon Moore’s famous observations known as Moore’s Law were made some 50 years ago, the industry has been putting the pieces into place for what comes next, in effect. “We’ve made products that are smart, and that’s great, but now we’re going to take ‘smart’ and do something special with it. We are moving beyond an internet of smart things, to a framework of ‘connected intelligence’ whose operation and capabilities in many ways mimic the way the mind works.”

Tom Caulfield, SVP & GM of Fab 8, was a keynote speaker and a part of the opening ceremony for SEMICON West 2017

Caulfield noted that the engine powering this move is semiconductor innovation but that in order to keep achieving the technological progress predicted by Moore’s Law, the industry must operate differently because things have become so complex and inter-twined. Scaling is still critical, but scaling alone is no longer an effective strategy.

“After 50 years the game is still ahead of us. We must redefine innovation, collaborate differently and shift engagement behaviors in order to drive needed innovation in data analysis, bandwidth, storage density and power management,” he said. He pointed to GF’s dual-technology roadmap as an example of how innovation is being redefined, with FinFETs representing one path forward for high-performance computing and FDX representing another path forward for wireless, battery-powered devices.

With regard to collaborating differently, Caulfield noted that as the world has developed and the industry has grown and become more complex, old ways of doing business are no longer adequate. He said that a strategy of collaboration today needs to be built on three elements: strategic partnerships with key suppliers; “coopetition” with industry rivals, meaning to cooperate with them in some areas and compete with them in others; and public-private partnerships.

He used the Albany Nanotech research facility as an example of the benefits of coopetition, saying, ”For the industry, it offsets our collective expense to develop technology at the leading edge and lets us build scale in key technologies on a virtual basis.”

With regard to engagement behaviors, he said, “The industry is now so complex that we’ve reached the point where when you look at a project team it’s difficult to know who is the vendor and who is the customer.  Sure, everyone has a boss, but they are really dedicated to the project.”

That’s just one example of how engagement behavior needs to evolve, Caulfield said. “Sharing ideas across global teams, working in an interdisciplinary fashion and encouraging a diversity of ideas are absolutely vital to technical innovation in today’s world,” he said. Click here to view Tom Caulfield’s presentation.

About Author

Gary Dagastine

Gary Dagastine is a writer who has covered the semiconductor industry for EE Times, Electronics Weekly and many specialized media outlets. He is a contributing editor at Nanochip Fab Solutions magazine and also is the Director of Media Relations for the IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM), the world’s most influential technology conference for semiconductors. He started in the industry at General Electric Co. where he provided communications support to GE’s power, analog and custom IC businesses. Gary is a graduate of Union College in Schenectady, New York,

By: Gerd Teepe​

Recently, Cadence hosted its two-day European CDNLive event at a multi-purpose arena in Munich. The arena at the INFINITY Hotel & Conference Resort is also often a draw for ice-hockey tournaments, rock concerts and other high-profile events and visitors. In fact, the Bayern-Munich soccer team has gathered here before important games the last couple of years, bringing further glamour to the area.

While the Bayern Munich players did not occupy the arena this year, there was another star attraction at the show—a technical innovation heralding a new era in image processing. Dream Chip Technologies GmbH of Hannover, Germany demonstrated a system with an image processing chip designed and manufactured with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX®) technology.

Dream Chip’s ADAS SoC system platform is based on a quad ARM® A53 processor complemented with a dual ARM-R5 lock-step processor, making the chip suitable for enhanced ASIL-type security applications. The image workhorse of the chip is the Vision-P6 processor from Cadence.

Source Dream Chip: Full system architecture of the image processing platform, soon to be implemented by Dream Chip.

The Vision P6 architecture from Cadence is based on the Tensilica architecture and is targeted for Convolutional Neural Network computations (CNNs). Image objects are detected by correlation of video images with a database of known images. For applications in the car, like sign- and pedestrian-recognition, this application needs to run at real-time with 30 frames per second. In essence, it’s a massive computational comparison of pictures occurring in real-time.

The prototype shown at CDNLive is the first-ever live system with an SoC implemented with GF’s 22FDX technology.  The chip is 64mm2 and is mounted on a package substrate together with two LPDDR4 memories.

Source Dream Chip: System module with chip and two LPDDR4-memories

The Dream Chip ADAS chip is a complex and multifunctional SoC. At CDNlive, Dream Chip demonstrated video capabilities through a system board mounted on top of a model car, with the signal of a hood-mounted GoPro camera fed into the system board.

Jens Benndorf, COO of Dream Chip, explained the further signaling path: “First fed into the chip, the video signal is passed to one of the four IVPs running a filter algorithm, then passed to the video-output and on to the display. It demonstrated that the IVP6 is working.”

 
Source GF: Dream Chip live Demo setup at CDNLive EMEA

In addition to the demo, Benndorf and his team gave a number of presentations on the system, the chip architecture and the CNN-based image processing for which the chip is targeted in the near future.

Dream Chip, GF, and partners are working fast and furious (pun intended!) to accelerate the SoC prototype for production readiness. First silicon was demonstrated in February 2017 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and a video on the platform was showcased at CDNLive in May. What will be next? Ride with us, and find out!  22FDX is enabling innovation in ADAS applications and eventually will for autonomous driving too. By then, Bayern Munich players will certainly notice.

By: Timothy Saxe​

Most electrical engineers are familiar with FPGAs, and many have had experience using standalone FPGAs.  eFPGA (embedded FPGA) technology allows a semiconductor company to embed an FPGA in an SoC or ASIC.  The industry knows from bitter experience (40 defunct FPGA startups and counting) that programmable logic is not easy.  The main stumbling block for FPGA startups has been the design environment, not the silicon.  The simple fact is that the silicon is only as good as the tools that support it – they must be straightforward, robust, easy-to-use, and deliver excellent quality of results.  As if that were not challenging enough, eFPGA products also exist in the ASIC design environment which uses a different tool flow.  Thus a successful eFPGA must have an excellent silicon implementation, excellent ASIC tool support, and an excellent FPGA tool flow.  Fortunately there are major benefits to embedding FPGA: lower power, higher performance, lower cost, improved future proofing and design flexibility.

QuickLogic started life 29 years ago producing standalone FPGAs.  15 years ago we saw that the economics had changed to favor mixing ASIC cores with programmable logic, and we started down the road of developing embedded FPGA solutions.  At that time, various FPGA startups were trying to sell eFPGA technology, but there was no uptake.  The reason there was no uptake was economic: masks were cheap, ASIC gates were cheap and FPGA logic was expensive.  Roll the clock forward 15 years, and now things have changed: masks are expensive, ASIC gates are cheaper and FPGA logic is also cheaper.  Our latest device, the EOS™ S3 System-on-Chip (SoC) targets the smartphone, wearable, and hearable markets. These are very price sensitive and power sensitive products.  Fortunately the GLOBALFOUNDRIES 40nm cost structure allows us to meet the price requirements with a product that has enough eFPGA to be really useful.  This enabled us to have a cost effective product where the hardware can be adapted for different markets without incurring mask costs.  In addition, having eFPGA allows us to move critical tasks from software into hardware to save power, which is critical for power sensitive applications.

A small digression on the meaning of power sensitive: everyone claims to be power sensitive. To server designers using a 25Watt FPGA to offload a 90Watt CPU is being power sensitive.  In the wearable market where people want six months from a CR2450 battery the average system power must be 410uW, and in the IoT market where people want three years from two AA batteries, the average system power must be 318uW.  Our focus is on the wearable and IoT markets, where designers expect the compute unit to use only 25% of the system power: 100uW for wearables, and 80uW for IoT.

Since we operate in markets that require low power, we see GLOBAFOUNDRIES 22FDX® process as the workhorse of the future for power sensitive markets.  The economics are better, and dynamic back-bias should enable designers to reduce average system power by 25% to 50% compared to 40nm.  Particularly important to IoT, the eMRAM, coming soon to 22FDX, enables both single chip devices as well as ultra-low power sleep states more cost effectively than flash memory.

Why now? What has changed in the past 15 years?

First, the bets are getting bigger: the combination of mask costs and software costs have soared.  Second, markets are more fragmented, which means lower volumes per design.  Finally, future growth lies in IoT, which seems to mean a lot of different things.

Now if you have a crystal ball that accurately predicts the future, you can simply produce an ASIC that meets those needs.  But if you don’t, including a QuickLogic ArcticPro™ eFPGA block in your design will let you:

• Update your hardware when standards update or evolve
• Update your features when you discover new market needs
• Create multiple product variants from a single mask set
• Get to market more quickly, and stay in market longer by evolving product features

Over the years, we have found that this is the hardest point to grasp.  Talk to the ASIC team and they will tell you, correctly, to just tell them what you need and they can implement it better.  The disconnect is that they are not responsible for defining what is required.  Now you have another option.  Include a small block of eFPGA – you will find it surprisingly economical in 22FDX.  QuickLogic has been doing this for 15 years, so we understand what it takes for a successful integration – our methodology makes it no harder than adding any other hard macro.  We also understand what a production quality FPGA design flow looks like – we’ve been supplying them to the most quality and reliability-conscious markets in the world – aerospace, defense, and instrumentation & test markets for 30 years.  We understand really low power – we’ve been doing that for five years, and FD-SOI is the perfect complement to the ArcticPro architecture.  Finally, eco-system is vital to the diverse needs of IoT, and the GLOBAFOUNDRIES FDXcelerator™ brings together a diverse collection of proven IP, such as our ArcticPro eFPGA, that enables silicon architects to rapidly develop high value, low power systems-on-a-chip.

About Author

Timothy Saxe
Senior VP of Engineering and CTO

Timothy Saxe (Ph.D) has served as our Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer since November 2008. In August 2016, he expanded the role to include Senior Vice President of Engineering. Mr. Saxe has been with QuickLogic since May 2001 and during the last 15 years has held a variety of executive leadership positions including Vice President of Engineering and Vice President of Software Engineering. Dr. Saxe was Vice President of FLASH Engineering at Actel Corporation, a semiconductor manufacturing company. Dr. Saxe joined GateField Corporation, a design verification tools and services company formerly known as Zycad, in June 1983 and was a founder of their semiconductor manufacturing division in 1993. Dr. Saxe became GateField’s Chief Executive Officer in February 1999 and served in that capacity until GateField was acquired by Actel in November 2000. Mr. Saxe holds a B.S.E.E. degree from North Carolina State University, and an M.S.E.E. degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

• By: Gerd Teepe

Recently, Cadence hosted its two-day European CDNLive event at a multi-purpose arena in Munich. The arena at the INFINITY Hotel & Conference Resort is also often a draw for ice-hockey tournaments, rock concerts and other high-profile events and visitors. In fact, the Bayern-Munich soccer team has gathered here before important games the last couple of years, bringing further glamour to the area.

While the Bayern Munich players did not occupy the arena this year, there was another star attraction at the show—a technical innovation heralding a new era in image processing. Dream Chip Technologies GmbH of Hannover, Germany demonstrated a system with an image processing chip designed and manufactured with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 22nm FD-SOI (22FDX®) technology.

Dream Chip’s ADAS SoC system platform is based on a quad ARM® A53 processor complemented with a dual ARM-R5 lock-step processor, making the chip suitable for enhanced ASIL-type security applications. The image workhorse of the chip is the Vision-P6 processor from Cadence.

Source Dream Chip: Full system architecture of the image processing platform, soon to be implemented by Dream Chip.

The Vision P6 architecture from Cadence is based on the Tensilica architecture and is targeted for Convolutional Neural Network computations (CNNs). Image objects are detected by correlation of video images with a database of known images. For applications in the car, like sign- and pedestrian-recognition, this application needs to run at real-time with 30 frames per second. In essence, it’s a massive computational comparison of pictures occurring in real-time.

The prototype shown at CDNLive is the first-ever live system with an SoC implemented with GF’s 22FDX technology.  The chip is 64mm2 and is mounted on a package substrate together with two LPDDR4 memories.

Source Dream Chip: System module with chip and two LPDDR4-memories

The Dream Chip ADAS chip is a complex and multifunctional SoC. At CDNlive, Dream Chip demonstrated video capabilities through a system board mounted on top of a model car, with the signal of a hood-mounted GoPro camera fed into the system board.

Jens Benndorf, COO of Dream Chip, explained the further signaling path: “First fed into the chip, the video signal is passed to one of the four IVPs running a filter algorithm, then passed to the video-output and on to the display. It demonstrated that the IVP6 is working.”

Source GF: Dream Chip live Demo setup at CDNLive EMEA

In addition to the demo, Benndorf and his team gave a number of presentations on the system, the chip architecture and the CNN-based image processing for which the chip is targeted in the near future.

Dream Chip, GF, and partners are working fast and furious (pun intended!) to accelerate the SoC prototype for production readiness. First silicon was demonstrated in February 2017 at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and a video on the platform was showcased at CDNLive in May. What will be next? Ride with us, and find out!  22FDX is enabling innovation in ADAS applications and eventually will for autonomous driving too. By then, Bayern Munich players will certainly notice.

Foundry Files sat down with GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ new Vice President of Automotive Product Line Management, Mark Granger, to learn how GF is positioned to take advantage of the changes taking place in the automotive industry.

1. Mark, tell us about yourself, and what drew you to GF?

I’ve been in charge of high performance SoC product design and product management for about 20 years, most recently at NVIDIA where I led the company’s efforts to provide leading-edge application processors for autonomous vehicles. I jumped at the chance to join GF because of GF’s uniquely advantageous 22FDX and RF/power technologies that give us a great opportunity to become the leading provider of best-in-class automotive solutions. I’m here to help make that happen.

2. What are your main responsibilities at GF?

My job is to shape our growth path in automotive by identifying attractive areas of opportunity, ensuring that we are well-positioned in those areas, and working with customers and partners to take advantage of them. By the way, our universe of potential customers and partners isn’t only made up of automotive OEMs like BMW or VW, but also companies up and down the supply chain such as Bosch, Continental, Delphi, Denso, NXP, and increasingly even the likes of Google and Baidu, which are investing in autonomous driving.

3. Give us your view of the major changes taking place in the automotive industry.

Right now the industry is at an inflection point. Although the electronics content of vehicles has been increasing for years, everything really kicked into high gear last October. That’s when Tesla announced that all of its cars, including the new Model 3 which is aimed at the mass market, will have the hardware needed for autonomous vehicle control. That sent competitors scrambling and gave new, urgent momentum to efforts to develop autonomous, connected and highly energy-efficient vehicles.

For example, Ford recently invested $1 billion in a self-driving technology startup called Argo AI, which was founded by engineers from Google and Uber. GM, meanwhile, recently announced it’s hiring 1,100 workers to expand the San Francisco R&D facility of Cruise Automation, a Silicon Valley autonomous-vehicle technology company it bought last year.

Since October the pace of innovation in automotive has quickened to where it reminds me of the tempo of the mobile phone industry a few years ago, as it ramped up. The sense of possibility, the excitement and also the fear of being left behind are palpable in the automotive sector, and GF is pulling out all the stops to help our customers achieve their goals.

4. What differentiates GF and puts us in a strong position to take advantage of this tremendous opportunity?

Our 22FDX process meets automakers’ stringent requirements for low-power operation, low cost and high reliability while offering advanced processing, memory and RF capabilities. No one else can do all of this in one device. Our initial focus is two-fold: ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems) applications, including mmWave radar, and microcontrollers.

The ADAS space has particularly challenging requirements for energy efficiency and cost, and 22FDX enables unique and compelling solutions. It has already drawn great interest for SoCs for use in forward-view cameras for automated emergency braking systems and automated highway driving. One example is Dream Chip Technologies’ 22FDX-based SoC for automotive computer vision applications. It supports high-end computer-vision performance at very low power consumption, which enables ADAS functions such as road-sign recognition, lane-departure warning, driver-distraction warning, blind spot detection, surround vision, parking assist, pedestrian detection, cruise control and emergency braking.

The other big market for 22FDX technology is microcontrollers, where we bring best-in-class solutions. High-end cars may contain up to ~100 microcontrollers to manage the engine, transmission, powertrain, safety systems, etc., and that number is going to increase but also drive demand for integration of multiple functions on a single MCU – ideal for 22FDX.

5. Any other thoughts you’d like to share?

If you think about it in a larger context, all of these developments in autonomous automotive capabilities will change the way we live. For example, autonomous vehicles will enable older people who no longer drive to get out and about, helping them to enjoy a higher quality of life. The number of deaths on the road will decline dramatically. And even cityscapes will change for the better, because more efficient automated routing may do away with the need to devote so much real estate and infrastructure to traffic-related needs.

It’s a very exciting time to be involved in this industry, both from business and human perspectives.

Mark Granger was named GF’s Vice President of Automotive Product Line Management in March, 2017. A self-confessed “car guy,” he has a 1967 Ford Mustang convertible which he and his son restored to like-new condition.