Why FD-SOI? What can you do with it that you couldn’t do
before? That was the big question from IHS Markit’s Matthew Short that kicked
off the first panel discussion at the SOI Consortium’s Silicon Valley
Symposium. And there were some great answers.VeriSilicon, Analog Bits and Silicon Catalyst were among the consortium members with stands at the SOI Symposium, Silicon Valley 2019.Here in this final part of our coverage of the event, we’ll
detail who said what in the two panel discussions, as well as the presentations
by Leti, Intento Design the SOI Consortium’s IP/EDA roundup.If you missed the previous two installments of our coverage, you can catch up on the rest of the presentations in part 1 (NXP, Samsung more) here and part 2 here (Synaptics, GlobalFoundries more). Almost all of the presentations are now freely available under "events" on the consortium website - or just click here to get them.How FD-SOI Changes
What You Can DoThe presentation by Matthew Short, Sr. Director of IoT Technology at IHS Markit, was not specific to SOI, but it sure did lay out out the market opportunities. Entitled IoT, 5G, ADAS and AI Market, it’s available on our website. Matt spent most of his career in chip design at NXP/Freescale, so he really has an engineer’s perspective on where this all is going. At IHS Markit, they define IoT as anything with an IP address. Over the past year more than 10 billion devices were shipped, and there were more “things” than cellular handsets, so the world has really changed. He outlined the growth drivers, suggested that 5G won’t be a “wow” thing for consumers, and noted there is a lot of debate raging regarding how smart sensors should be (the Tier 1’s want smart).He was then joined on the stage by the participants in the
first panel discussion, which looked at product and application drivers. That
included: NXP Fellow Rob Cosaro; Tim Dry, Director of Edge Endpoints
Marketing at Samsung Foundry; ST biz dev director Roger Forchhammer; CoreAVI
biz dev VP Lee Melatti; Nokia VP Michael Reiha; and Analog Bits EVP Mahesh
Tirupattur.First Short asked why customers wanted more integrated
solutions. For CoreAvi, it’s about safety, for ST in automotive it’s about
security, for Analog Bits, it’s about integrating more analog, for Nokia it’s
just a necessity.Then he asked Why FD-SOI? What can you do that you couldn’t
do before? For ST, which is doing MCUs for automotive, it’s about energy
efficiency, speed, the density of non-volatile memory and the robustness of the
technology. For NXP, it’s back biasing, low voltage and power numbers never
seen before. “FD-SOI really makes a difference in the products we can bring to
market,” said Cosaro. For CoreAVI, it’s the long-term power impact. And for
Analog Bits, “Customers see huge benefits,” said Tirupattur, for cost sensitive
applications. He has customers selling their technology in high volumes in
FD-SOI. What about edge vs. cloud?
For Nokia, it’s monolithic integration for best-in-class RF, advanced
memory, biasing and voltage regulation adding a layer of intelligence. Samsung
sees edge as distributed cloud, and CoreAVI sees safety in the edge, because
you can’t completely rely on the cloud.Where are the weak points in the FD-SOI ecosystem? For
Samsung, more people need to use back biasing. “People need to use the knobs,”
said Dry. For Analog Bits, the next step is innovation around back biasing, as
many in logic don’t understand the benefits, so the ecosystem needs to promote
the value proposition. ST suggests that with more products out there, customers
will see the benefits. NXP did “a lot of the heavy lifting” at 28nm – now you
need more people using these nodes, not just the cellphone nodes.How will the architecture change? For NXP, it’s all about
memory bandwidth. For Samsung, it’s the promise of analog and interconnect.
Nokia sees the back-end and heterogeneous integration with FD-SOI and RF
enablement. Analog Bits’ Tirupattur said he’s pushing his engineers for even
lower power in a still smaller form factor, noting that most analog engineers
had been more focused on performance than power, but now that’s changed. For ST, it’s AI/ML throughout automotive, and
FD-SOI is beneficial there.Leti the
Connected Car Leti's slide 27, SOI Symposium, Silicon Valley 2019Research giant Leti’s presentation was entitled Applications Around the Connected Car. 85% of Leti’s €315M budget comes from R D contracts with its 350 industrial partners. Truly a driving force in FD-SOI, Leti is involved in a dizzying array of projects. For the connected car, they cover (much of it on SOI): high precision smart sensing, embedded processing fusion, new computing paradigms and deep learning, ultra-low power computing nodes framework, ultra-low power connectivity for IoT, energy management and scavenging, and security. They do vision at the edge, 3D technology for smart imagers, and ways to dramatically reduce power. They’ve got a Qbits platform on FD-SOI for AI at the edge, a super low power neural network accelerator, and ULP connectivity. Check out the presentation for lots of details.EDA/IP OverviewSlide 9 from SOI EDA/IP Overview.SOI Consortium Executive Co-Director Jon Cheek gave a quick round-up presentation aggregating various IP and EDA offerings entitled , SOI EDA/IP Overview. It is taken from recent member presentations including Cadence, Silvaco, VeriSilicon, Synopsys and GlobalFoundries, giving you an idea of how dynamic the ecosystem has become.Automating Analog While the logic side of the design equation has long had robust automation tools, some consider the analog side as sort of black magic. New consortium member Intento Design aims to fix that. Here at ASN we covered their work with ST briefly a few months ago here. At the SOI Symposium, the company’s CEO Dr. Ramy ISKANDER presented their solution in ID-XploreTM: A Disruptive EDA for Emerging FDSOI Applications. Intento, a partner in GlobalFoundries FDXcelerator program, has cognitive software for first-time right analog design. It determines the appropriate static and dynamic body biasing ranges to meet PVTB (Process/Voltage/Temperature/Body Bias), and is fully integrated into the Cadence Environment. They produced multiple correct-by-construction FD-SOI designs, and the total time spent to generate eight candidates FD-SOI designs took less than a day. The Tools Are in the
BoxThe last panel discussion, entitled Are the Tools in the Box? was moderated by the Consortium’s Jon Cheek.
Participants included: VeriSilicon SVP David Jarmon; Arm PDG Marketing VP
Kelvin Low; NXP’s Stefano Pietri, Technical Director of the company’s
Microcontrollers Analog Design Team; Jamie Schaeffer, who’s GF’s Sr. Product
Offering Manager for 22FDX and 12FDX; and Cadence Strategic Alliances Director
Jonathan Smith. 2nd panel discussion, SOI Symposium, Silicon Valley 2019Yes, the tools are in the box. Smith of Cadence said they’re
providing them, and NXP’s Pietro said that they’re very well positioned in his
specialty, analog. VeriSilicon has IP, and anything they don’t have in house
they’ll license. So why be afraid of body biasing? NXP has proof by example – they see such huge cost advantages that they try to leverage it as much as possible. GF’s doing training, since each area (automotive, IoT, etc.) has different needs. Some VeriSilicon customers already see such substantial benefits from FD-SOI that they’re not bothering to do biasing. Cadence points out that the Arm POP announcement is huge, and Arm’s Low wondered if the SOI Consortium could do an IP portal? “Our sales departments need to explain the advantages to our customers!” said NXP’s Pietro.From the audience, NXP VP longtime FD-SOI proponent Ron Martino (who, btw, wrote some great articles for ASN when they first got into FD-SOI – read them here), asked why designers think FD-SOI means a lot of corners? How do we convince the industry that FD-SOI simplifies design? Cadence is working with GF, responded Smith, and will have some big new at Arm’s TechCon this fall. “We need more training and marketing to show it’s not scary," he added. For GF, the corners don’t get more complicated, and they’re working with Dolphin Integration on getting them covered early in the planning. Ease of access to IP will help, per Arm. And in a great concluding remark, VeriSilicon’s Jarmon said,
“The craft is being automated. The more we work together, the greater success
of FD-SOI.”
