‘Consumer Digitization accelerating DSP applications’

BANGALORE: "Consumer Digitization is rapidly accelerating the growth and

development of DSP applications, thereby rapidly increasing the design

challenges in VLSI", said Texas Instruments India managing director Dr.

Biswadip Mitra. He was delivering the keynote address,

"Consumer Digitization: Accelerating DSP Applications, Mounting VLSI

Design Challenges" at the annual VLSI Conference.

During the course of his presentation Dr. Mitra went on to say,

"Increasing VLSI Design, Challenges’ greatest opportunity for growth in

the Internet Age will come from combining broadband and mobility".

Bandwidth explosion, personalized bandwidth and multimedia convergence are

beginning to change the landscape of how we live, work, connect and entertain.

And two new technologies have emerged to lead this Internet Age: Digital Signal

Processors (DSPs) and Analog semiconductors.

DSPs are doing for communications what the microprocessor did for computing.

DSP and Analog technologies bridge the gap between the digital world and analog

world. And they do it in real-time. In addition, because one can program the

DSPs, manufacturers and network service providers can quickly integrate new

features and evolving standards into existing equipment. This reduces long-term

infrastructure costs and facilitates rapid service rollouts.

Today, DSP applications range from cellular handsets, Basestations, Cable

Modems and DSLs, IP Telephony to MP3 players, Digital Still Cameras, Digital

Motor Control Systems and many more. These applications are all characterized by

the need to have a combination of DSP and high performance Analog functions.

Worldwide, programmable DSP chip shipments for the year 2000 were over US $ 6.1
billion according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS). Despite the

cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry, has witnessed in 2001, a compound

annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27 per cent is predicted for DSP shipments through

2005.

One of the key challenges of this dramatic growth and widespread application of
DSPs is in terms of the increasing complexities of VLSI design. The challenge of

integrating more transistors, but using less power, has led to a dramatic

evolution of semiconductors and CAD

methodologies.

In 1980, a typical DSP chip had 50,000 transistors and could process 5

million instructions per second (MIPS). These chips sold for about $150 each and

consumed 250 milliwatts of power per MIPS. Today, it is routine to have more

than 10 million transistors on a chip - delivering 5 billion instructions per

second at just one-tenth of a milliwatt per MIPS. Such chips sell for about $5

today. That's less than a penny per MIPS compared to $30 per MIPS twenty years

ago. And power consumption is a tiny sliver of what it once was.

By 2010, we anticipate that DSPs can process 3 trillion instructions per

second with a chip about the size of a thumbtack.

Functional integration is another new twist. This implies taking analog and

digital functions that had been handled earlier by separate chips, and combining

these onto a single chip. This analog integration challenge (with minimal cost

delta due to additional masks), the need to miniaturize, the need for high

performance at the lowest possible power makes it a very interesting challenge

for VLSI designers.

At the same time, success in these very attributes by VLSI designers

worldwide has led to the explosion in DSP applications in the past few years.

And indeed, we are sure that there are many more innovations in VLSI design that

are yet to come and there are many applications of DSP that have not been

invented yet - an area for future developers and entrepreneurs to exploit."