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Devices of the future are a reality today thanks to advancements in semiconductor design. Be it a design of complex compression algorithms or a mixed signal component design, VLSI designs make all this possible. They also have made wireless embedded systems shrink day by day.
Emerging wireless communications technologies are going beyond traditional voice services, and now have the potential to dramatically enhance the Internet experience by adding new capabilities like built-in cameras, Bluetooth connectivity and MP3 support. As the task becomes more complex, semiconductor suppliers are taking on greater challenges, providing complete platform solutions that include not just the RF, baseband and mixed-signal circuitry, but also the protocol stack and user interface software, comprehensive reference designs and development tools.
The demand for real-time VLSI compression in high-speed wireless local area networks is rising. VLSI engineers are today very much part of the wireless embedded systems work. Complex wireless embedded components are able to function only when they are developed in hardware-the software drastically fails to meet requirements. Using the Advance VLSI design and Mixed signal design, designing complex functions are now feasible.
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| Experts panel |
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Ganesh Guruswamy, country manager and director, Freescale Semiconductor India
Rahoul Verma, manager - PDCI Bangalore, ARM
Rahul Arya, director marketing, India and SAARC, Cadence Design Systems
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Today one of the most challenging areas for VLSI designers is VLSI circuit and system design for wireless applications. The design of a cellular radio system involves several engineering disciplines ranging from communication theory and digital signal processing to high frequency semiconductor technology and circuit design. Furthermore, the new generation of wireless systems, which includes multimedia, puts severe constraints on performance, cost, size, power and energy.
Designing Mobility
The mobile entertainment ecosystem comprises thousands of companies-wireless carriers, consumer electronics retailers, content developers, device manufacturers and software developers. All these companies are competing for a potentially lucrative stake. Creating open, interoperable semiconductor solutions to fuel this ecosystem will in turn drive highly creative and strategic partnerships. These partnerships will feed innovation and help overcome some of the barriers to successful market entries for many new and emerging technologies, innovative products and market participants.
Creating compelling devices for mobile entertainment poses a special set of challenges. The market is moving forward with incredible momentum, pushing designers and manufacturers to quickly solve demanding and often unexpected problems related to wireless connectivity, power management, processor performance, security and interoperability. These are just a few of the challenges that semiconductor companies face in their efforts to enable a seamless mobile entertainment experience.
Mobility is increasing the speed and changing the character of this evolution. Audio has already gone mobile, in the form of podcasting, audio books and music on MP3 players. It won't be long before the mobile trend will encompass multimedia.
Gamers are designing and distributing their own games; perhaps they will soon be able to distribute wirelessly. Amateur filmmakers have websites dedicated to showcasing their short films; soon it may be possible to send digital video directly from a set to their home studio. This kind of mobility revolution poses special technical challenges.
Power Management
As devices become more complex and consume more power, it becomes critical to discover ways to squeeze more life out of batteries. Even an application that you might think of as low-power, such as mobile email, can drain a battery quickly because the application is constantly pinging a central server for updates. Can you imagine how quickly a multiplayer networked videogame would drain the average handheld's battery? Broadband and always-on appliances will pose a future power problem.
Power management is the single most worrying concern for mobile companies and operators alike. Low power design is a business critical need and has a direct impact on carrier revenue. Every time a call drops because of low battery, it translates into lost revenue.
The drive for smaller form-factor phones with lighter batteries has forced vendors to reduce the power consumed by the load. While Li-ion batteries have contributed significantly to reduce the form factor and weight of phones, the energy density of Li-ion batteries is not expected to increase much.
Threatened with the potential of high costs coupled with missed time-to-market opportunities, companies will have to overcome their reluctance to adopt advanced process geometries and effective low-power methodologies at 90nm, 65nm, and below. This requires participation from all segments of the industry.
| Challenges Addressed by VLSI |
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Power management – Application processors are designed with inbuilt power management and lower clock speed.
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Balancing speed with power – Architectures are being designed that use specialized execution units (SEUs) that need few or no instructions transferred from memory, use memory more efficiently, and thus use less power than general-purpose execution units (GEUs).
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Security – Chips now have inbuilt encryption and security mechanisms to provide hardware level security.
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Interoperability – Device-agnostic and user interface-agnostic application processors have been developed that allow standards flexibility. VLSI developers are opting for open source standards.
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Semiconductor companies are cognizant of the power management challenge and have joined hands and created forums to address the issue. One such initiative is the Power Forward Initiative (PFI). The goal of the initiative is to remove the barriers to automation of advanced low power design, and to provide a pathway towards the development of a standards-based solution.
ZigBee, the IEEE 802.15.4 standard for wireless networking, automation and control applications is another example of a power-saving wireless solution.
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