Plenary Talks
High Performance Mixed-Signal: Business and Technology
Dr. Rene Penning de Vries
NXP
The increasing sophistication of technical solutions enabled by our industry, will more and more be enabled by ICs that bridge the analog world with sensor and actuation functions to the digital world of signal processing and storage. Many of these application optimized functions will emerge in the coming years and will find differentiation by mixed-signal designs in specific --More-than-Moore-- technologies. We believe this class of circuits provides great new growth opportunities to the semiconductor industry.
NXP's strategy is focused on High-Performance Mixed-Signal applications, delivering mixed signal products with differentiating specifications in power efficiency, functional performance and resilience. Circuits are realized by maximally exploiting the principles of analog and digital co- design, this as opposed to the well-known HW / SW co-design styles developed in the last decade for the complex System-on-Chips.
In the presentation we will illustrate the above with a number of examples. The energy required per conversion step can be minimized in data converters by combined advances in both converter architectures and digital-assisted analog design techniques that relax the requirements on the analog matching properties. For Near Field Communications, the net bitrate within a defined power budget is optimized by tuning the modulation scheme. And in stand-alone microcontrollers, the key figure of merit is the combination of the energy per logical operation in conjunction with the standby power. We will illustrate how dynamic backgate control can be applied to achieve breakthrough results, which is essentially is an analog-supported digital design approach.
On the functional performance side recent innovations have further enhanced maximum bit-rates in high-speed serial interfaces. Another example shows how trade-offs between physical matching properties and time resolution result in GHz bandwidth Nyquist ADCs suitable for full-spectrum cable-TV receivers. In this presentation we will elaborate on a number of these high-performance mixed-signal innovations.