design

RF-SOI innovators Jean-Pierre Raskin of UCL and Bernard Aspar of Soitec changed the course for key RF chips. The industry has long recognized their contributions: their solution for “trap-rich” RF-SOI wafers is now the starting point to virtually every FEM in every smart phone on the planet (really!). And of course here at ASN we've been following their work for over a decade. Now more accolades are coming in. The latest is the 2017 European SEMI Award, which was given at ISS Europe 2018 for “...their seminal work with radio frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF-SOI) substrates” (read the press release here). As SEMI notes, the “...award winners’ pioneering research and collaboration with academia and industry led to major advances in RF switches and ushered RF-SOI technology from concept to worldwide adoption.” Aspar and Raskin were nominated and selected by their peers within the international semiconductor community. [caption id="attachment_11677" align="alignleft" width="150"] Bernard Aspar, Executive Vice President, Communication Power BU at Soitec Aspar founded CEA-Leti spinoff Tracit Technologies in 2003. He was appointed senior vice president of the Tracit Division (now the Communication Power business unit) when Soitec acquired Tracit in 2006. He has more than 15 years of experience in direct wafer-bonding and layer transfer. Aspar has filed more than 35 patents and co-authored some 100 scientific articles. He holds engineering and Ph.D. degrees in materials sciences and a master’s degree in microelectronics from the University of Montpellier, France.[/caption] [caption id="attachment_11678" align="alignleft" width="150"] Jean-Pierre Raskin, professor, Université catholique de Louvain (UCL) Raskin contributed to pioneering scientific studies demonstrating that silicon-based MOS technology could enable affordable, high-quality mobile devices. His findings led to the advent of RF-SOI technology and today impact the global microelectronics industry. He is an IEEE Senior Member, EuMA Associate Member and Member of the Research Center in Micro and Nanoscopic Materials and Electronic Devices of the Université catholique de Louvain, where he has been a full professor since 2007. He is author or co-author of more than 350 scientific articles.[/caption] Their advanced RF-SOI technology is now behind a wide range of applications and systems in areas including mobile devices, satellite communications, IoT, automotive radar and aerospace. If you want to better understand all this, a few years ago UCL and Soitec teams contributed an excellent article to ASN. It clearly explains how and why these new substrates came to be. You can still read it here. (Or if you're still a little confused about RF-SOI vs. RF on FD-SOI, here's a piece we did back in 2015 that explains the basics.)

ST Fellow Dr. Andreia Cathelin gave a terrific presentation at the recent CMP Annual Meeting. Now posted and freely available, Performance of Recent Outstanding 28nm FD-SOI Circuits Taped Out Through CMP highlighted eight examples – though she told ASN that she had easily over 50 from which to choose.CMP is a Multi-Project Wafer (MPW) service organization in ICs, Photonic ICs and MEMS. They’ve been organizing prototyping and low volume production in cooperation with foundries for over 37 years. In partnership with ST since 1994, in the fall of 2012 they opened access to MPW runs in the 28nm FD-SOI process. More than 180 tape-outs have been fabricated since then using the process.As Dr. Cathelin said, this lets ST show their industrial clients just how good the technology is. The chips she chose to cover in her presentation get “spectacular performance”, she said, especially for low-power or power-sensitive SoCs.Here’s a quick recap of what she presented (some of which she co-authored), followed by some other SOI-related updates from the CMP meeting.8 (of Many) Great ChipsFD-SOI, said Dr. Cathelin, “...is unmatched for cost-sensitive markets requiring digital and Mixed Signal SoC integration and performance.” In the first dozen slides of her presentation, she gave the technical details on the advantages of FD-SOI in analog, RF/millimeter wave, Analog/Mixed-Signal and digital design. If you're a designer, you'll want to check those out.Then she ran through eight great chips – all manufactured by ST on 28nm FD-SOI through CMP's MPW services. Here they are. (You can click on the illustrations to see them in full screen.)1. A digital delay line with coarse/fine tuning through gate/body biasing in 28nm FDSOI [caption id="attachment_11559" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, ISEN)[/caption] This chip was presented at ESSCIRC '16 by a team from ISEN Lille, Professors Andreas Kaiser and Antoine Frappé (you can get the complete paper by I.Sourikopoulos et al on IEEE Xplore – click here.) As noted in the abstract, “Delay controllability has always been the major concern for the reliable implementation of circuits whose purpose is timing.” By leveraging body biasing in FD-SOI, this novel low-power design architecture for 60GHz receivers enables very high bandwidth together with fine-grain wide range delay flexibility, for implementing Delay Feedback Equalizer techniques in the Intermediate Frequency (IF) reception path. The results are state-of-the-art: ultra wide range, linear control, fs/mV sensitivity and energy efficient controllable delay cells. 2. 28FD-SOI Distributed Oscillator at 134 GHz and 202GHz [caption id="attachment_11560" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, ims)[/caption] Presented at RFIC '17 by a team from the IMS Bordeaux lab, Professor Yann Deval and STMicroelectronics, this chip demonstrates the highest oscillation frequency attainable so far at the 28nm node, be it planar bulk or FD-SOI. (Click here to get the full paper by R. Guillaume et al from IEEE Xplore.) As noted in the abstract, solutions on silicon for mmW and sub-mmW applications have been demonstrated for high-speed wireless communications, compact medical and security imaging. The main challenges are for the signal generation at high frequencies, and this implementation demonstrates spectacular oscillation frequencies close to the transistor’s transition frequency (fT). In this chip, they used body bias tuning to optimize the phase noise, demonstrated very low on-wafer variability, and simulation methods that permit measurement prediction precision within 0.1%.3. A 128 kb Single-Bitline 8.4 fJ/bit 90MHz at 0.3V 7T Sense-Amplifier-less SRAM in 28nm FD-SOI [caption id="attachment_11561" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, Lund U.)[/caption] Extremely energy efficient SoCs are key for the IoT era – but SRAM gets very tricky at ultra-low voltages (ULV). Presented at ESSCIRC '16 by B. Mohammadi et al (on IEEE Xplore here) from Professor Joachim Rodrigues' team at the Lund University, this is a 128 kb ULV SRAM, based on a 7T bitcell. The minimum operating voltage VMIN is measured as just 240mV and the retention voltage is as low as 200mV. FD-SOI enabled them to overcome ULV performance and reliability challenges by letting the Lund U.-lead team selectively overdrive the bitline and wordline with a new single-cycle charge-pump. Plus they came up with a new scheme so it doesn't need a sense amplifier, yet delivered 90MHz read speed at 300mV, dissipating 8.4 fJ/bit-access.4. Matched Ultrasound Receiver in 28FDSOI [caption id="attachment_11562" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, Stanford U.)[/caption] Presented at ISSCC '17 (with an extended relative paper at JSSC '17) by M-C Chen et al with Professor Boris Murmann's team at Stanford, the full title of the paper about this chip is A Pixel Pitch-Matched Ultrasound Receiver for 3-D Photoacoustic Imaging With Integrated Delta-Sigma Beamformer in 28-nm UTBB FD-SOI. (Click here to get it on IEEE Xplore.) It's a a proof-of-concept for a big ultrasound receiver: a “pixel pitch-matched readout chip for 3-D photoacoustic (PA) imaging.” PA is “...an emerging medical imaging modality based on optical excitation and acoustic detection.” It's used in studying cancer progression in clinical research, for example. As noted in the paper abstract, “The overall subarray beamforming approach improves the area per channel by 7.4 times and the single-channel SNR by 8 dB compared to prior art with similar delay resolution and power dissipation.” One of the (many) advantages of FD-SOI in this context is for front-end signal conditioning in each pixel. This unique type of pixel pitch-matched architecture implementation is possible only in a 28nm (or less) node of an FD-SOI technology, as it is matched with the pitch sizing needed for the ultrasound transducers in order to generate signals for a 3-D reading.5. SleepTalker - 28nm FDSOI ULV WSN Transmitter: RF-mixed signal-digital SoC [caption id="attachment_11563" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, UCL)[/caption] Presented at VLSI '16 and JSSC '17 by G. de Streel et al from Professor David Bol’s team at Université Catholique de Louvain la Neuve, the full title of the paper about this chip is SleepTalker: A ULV 802.15.4a IR-UWB Transmitter SoC in 28-nm FDSOI Achieving 14 pJ/b at 27 Mb/s With Channel Selection Based on Adaptive FBB and Digitally Programmable Pulse Shaping (get it on IEEE Xplore here). This chip tackles the IoT requirement for sensing functions that can operate in the ULV context. That means creating wireless sensor nodes (WSN) that can be powered on an energy harvesting power budget – and that's a real challenge if you want to incorporate an RF component that can handle medium data rates (5-30 Mb/s) for vision or large distributed WSN networks. The energy efficiency has to be better than 100 pJ/b. To get there, the UCL-lead team used wide-range on-chip adaptive forward back biasing for “...threshold voltage reduction, PVT compensation, and tuning of both the carrier frequency and the output power. [...] Operated at 0.55 V, it achieves a record energy efficiency of 14 pJ/b for the transmitter (TX) alone and 24 pJ/b for the complete SoC with embedded power management. The TX SoC occupies a core area of 0.93 mm2.”6. A 128x8 Massive MIMO Precoder-Detector in 28FDSOI [caption id="attachment_11564" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, Lund U.)[/caption] This massive MIMO chip was presented at ISSCC '17 by a team from Professors Liang Liu and Ove Edforss at the Lund University in a paper entitled 3.6 A 60pJ/b 300Mb/s 128×8 Massive MIMO precoder-detector in 28nm FD-SOI (H. Prabhu, et al; get it from IEEEE Xplore here). While Massive MIMO (MaMi) will be needed for next-gen communications, it can't be achieved by just scaling MIMO – that would be too costly in terms of flexibility, area and power. As noted in the Lund U. team's intro, “Algorithm optimizations and a highly flexible framework were evaluated on real measured channels. Extensive hardware time multiplexing lowered area cost, and leveraging on flexible FD-SOI body bias and clock gating resulted in an energy efficiency of 6.56nJ/QRD and 60pJ/b at 300Mb/s detection rate.”7. ENVISION: A 0.26-to-10TOPS/W Subword-Parallel Dynamic-Voltage-Accuracy-Frequency-Scalable Convolutional Neural Network Processor in 28nm FDSOI [caption id="attachment_11565" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, KU Leuven)[/caption] Today's solutions for always-on visual recognition apps are an order of magnitude too power hungry for wearables. Running at 10's to several 1OO's of GOPS/W, they use classification algorithms called ConvNets, or Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The paper about this chip was presented at ISSCC '17 by a team from professor Marian Verhelst at Katoliek Universiteit Leuven (B. Moons, et al, get it from IEEE Xplore here), and it changes everything. Leveraging FD-SOI and body-biasing, the KU Leuven team solved the power challenge with, “...the concept of hierarchical recognition processing, combined with the Envision platform: an energy-scalable ConvNet processor achieving efficiencies up to 10TOPS/W, while maintaining recognition rate and throughput. Envision hereby enables always-on visual recognition in wearable devices.”8. Fine-Grained AVS in 28nm FDSOI Processor SoC [caption id="attachment_11566" align="alignnone" width="768"] (Courtesy: CMP, ST, UC Berkeley)[/caption] As we learned at SOI Consortium FD-SOI Tutorial Day in SiValley last year, Professor Borivoje “Bora” Nikolic of UC Berkeley is known as one of the world's top experts in body-biasing for digital logic (he and his team have designed more than ten chips in ST’s 28nm FD-SOI!) They presented the RISC-V chip here at ESSCIRC '16 and JSSC '17, in a paper entitled Sub-microsecond adaptive voltage scaling in a 28nm FD-SOI processor SoC (B.Keller, et al, on IEEE Xplore here). As they noted in the intro, a major challenge for mobile and IoT devices is that their workloads are highly variable, but they operate under very tight power budgets. If you apply adaptive voltage scaling (AVS), you can improve energy efficiency by scaling the voltage to match the workload. But in the current gen of SoCs, the AVS timescales of hundreds of microseconds is too slow. The chip the Berkeley team presented brought that down to sub-microseconds by aggressively applying body-biasing throughout the chip, including to workload measurement circuits and integrated power management units. The result is “... extremely fine-grained ( 1μs) adaptive voltage scaling for mobile devices.” (BTW, they expand on some of the details in another paper published in 2017.) These design techniques are now taught at UC Berkeley, as this kind of implementation is the subject of a course in SoC design (including the RF part of transceivers); a first educational chip has already been taped-out and successfully measured. (BTW, Professor Nikolic will once again join Dr. Cathelin and other luminaries in teaching at the SOI Consortium's FD-SOI Training Day in Silicon Valley, 27 April 2018 - click here for sign-up information.)More SOI Through CMPAt the meeting, CMP also made a presentation on all their MPW offerings – you can get it here. On ST's SOI (in addition to 28nm FD-SOI, of course), that includes the new 160nm SOIBCD8s: Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS Smart Power (for automotive sensor interface ICs, 3D ultrasound, MEMS micro-mirror drivers); and 130nm H9-SOI-FEM: Front-End Module (for radio receiver/transceiver, cellular, WiFi, and automotive keyless systems).CMP also provides tutorials that are used by institutions across the globe. A new update to the tutorial, RTL to GDS Digital Design Flow in 28nm FD-SOI Process is now available – you can see the presentation they did about that here. (It now includes LVS and DRC steps with Mentor/Calibre or Cadence/PVS.) Other services, like the 2-day, hands-on THINGS2DO FD-SOI training days at the end of March are always fully booked almost immediately, but don't hesitate to inquire, as they'll be adding more. For some more examples of 28nm FD-SOI chips run through CMP over the years, see their website pages on Examples of Manufactured ICs. There are also some nice examples on pages 21 and 23 of their most recent annual report. For those in the photonics world, CMP has teamed up with Leti to offer Si-310 PHMP2M, a 200mm CMOS SOI platform. CMP is cooperating with Tyndall for the photonics packaging – see that presentation here. Training kits and tutorials will be available in Q3 of this year. And in partnership with MEMSCAP, CMP offers Multi-User MEMS Processes (aka MUMPs) for SOI-MEMS.So lots of terrific SOI resources for CMP – check it out!~ ~ ~Note: special thanks to Andreia Cathelin of ST and Kholdoun Torki of CMP for their help on this piece.

FD-SOI has hit Q1 with terrific momentum, both in terms of visibility into products and in press coverage. In case you missed them, here are three articles you should definitely read: FD-SOI Adoption Expands – Technology shifts direction after years of competing directly with CMOS at advanced nodes (by Ed Sperling at Semiconductor Engineering) 22FDX Shows IoT Traction at MWC 2018 (by David Lammers for GF's Foundry Files) The Future of Silicon: An Exclusive Interview with Dr. Gary Patton, CTO of GlobalFoundries (by Ian Cutress at AnandTech) But, if you don't have time to read them all right away, here are some highlights to tide you over til you do. Expanding Adoption Ed Sperling at SemiEngineering sees FD-SOI adoption “... gaining ground across a number of new markets, ranging from IoT to automotive to machine learning, and diverging sharply from its original position as a less costly alternative to finFET-based designs.” After recounting the advantages (with which ASN readers are well familiar), he notes that two things have changed in our industry. First, fewer and fewer companies can afford to design in the most advanced FinFET nodes. And second: there are enough emerging markets where power is critical, but there won't necessarily be the billions of units per chip needed to amortize exorbitant design costs. In particular, for FD-SOI adoption he cites, “...the inferencing stage of machine learning [note: that happens in “edge” devices], base-stations, IoT and IIoT, bitcoin mining, 5G, radar, and a variety of automotive applications.” (GF's Jamie Schaeffer makes the technical case in the article for NB-IoT and automotive if you want more info.) ST's Giorgio Cesana makes an interesting point about body biasing (that I hadn't hear before) re: uni-direction vs. bi-directional. Currently, he explains, body biasing is uni-directional – although you can use it now in such a way that is effectively bi-directional. However, after the 22nm node, it will become truly bi-directional, which will enable wider swings for power savings. (For those concerned about pre-mature chip aging, see the full article for explanations by experts from Soitec who explain why that's not a problem after all.) Cesana also points out that the kind of chips leveraging FD-SOI are not the kind of chips that will need to move to a new node every year. They're looking for power savings, not shrink. Sperling goes on to make an interesting observation about Intel/MobileEye and power savings vs. shrink – by all means read what he has to say about that.... In conclusion, Sperling asserts that we are now witnessing a shift in the semi supply chain essentially dovetailing with the expansion of FD-SOI adoption and its ecosystem, wherein “...as new markets open up, chipmakers are finding themselves much closer to the application than in the past.” All in all a great read – don't miss it. Products! David Lammers (who you probably know from SST) wrote about products on FD-SOI for GF's Foundry Files in 22FDX Shows IoT Traction at MWC 2018. A number of start-ups will be showing products on GF's 22FDX (FD-SOI) technology at Mobile World Congress. For example, Nanotel Technology is using 22FDX to “...reduce power consumption for its mixed-signal NB-IoT modem.” Lammers interviewed the company's CTO, Anup Savla, who explained, “We have a digital engine, a processor, designed around IoT applications, where the emphasis is on low power and low leakage. With 22FDX there are knobs that are available to turn down the power and leakage. The opportunities to do that are unparalleled, and you just don’t get that kind of opportunity from bulk CMOS.” A significant part to this design is analog – which of course really benefits from FD-SOI. [caption id="attachment_11520" align="alignleft" width="300"] Riot Micro CEO Peter Wong cites savings in power, area and TTM with 22FDX. (Courtesy: GlobalFoundries)[/caption] Riot Micro on the other hand, has designed an all-digital cellular modem for LTE Cat-M and NB-IOT. There's no DSP, and big parts of the chip can be shut down as needed to save power for long-term battery operation in the field (get more details in the full GF blog). Several major cellular carriers are on track to certify it this year, and a Middle Eastern customer plans to incorporate it into an emergency-alert system. The company's CEO, Peter Wong told Lammers, “With 22FDX, the value proposition for us is potential power and area savings.” They also leveraged the growing 22FDX IP ecosystem to accelerate TTM. Dream Chip Technologies, which as Lammers reminds us, showed their multi-core vision processor at MWC last year, says that now “...the design is providing European auto makers and Tier 1 automotive component suppliers with a platform from which they can create custom derivatives.” Verisilicon, an SOI Consortium member and a major FD-SOI champion in China will be teaming up with GF show their dual-mode connectivity solutions (which we first heard about last year). GF and VeriSilicon have a suite of IP so that customers can create single-chip, low-power wide-area (LPWA) solutions that support either LTE-M (for the US) or NB-IoT (for Asia Europe). The IP covers integrated baseband, power management, RF radio and front-end components. Lammers also cited Anubhav Gupta, GF's director of strategic marketing and business development for IoT, AI Machine Learning. He said they've got customers taking older multi-chip designs and re-creating them as single-chip solutions in 22FDX for better performance and savings in area, power and cost. Gupta noted that with body biasing in digital designs, they can operate down to 0.4V with standby leakage currents of less than one picoamp per micron. And when embedded MRAM is used in tandem with on-chip SRAM, off-chip flash can be completely eliminated. Nice! Clear Winner In a wide-ranging interview (see part 7, which focuses on FD-SOI), GF CTO Gary Patton told Anandtech's Ian Cutress that, “FinFET is a great technology for [performance at any cost], but if you're looking for something that is more in the consumer space, you need to balance performance with power and cost, you know FD-SOI is a clear winner.” Patton told Cutress that they have working 12FDX devices in NY that are already close to reaching performance targets. They'll be in risk production in early 2019. Meanwhile in 22FDX, Patton talked about the different flavors, including RF, ULP, UL leakage and mmWave, and how well suited they are for target applications especially in automotive and IoT. Elsewhere in the interview he mentioned that potential customers in the cryptocurrency mining businesses are looking at 22FDX, and that ST will be using it to do some “incredible products”. All in all – products and press – it's a really fine Q1.

RF-SOI is in every smart phone out there, and with 5G, there are lots more applications on the horizon. If you’d like to learn more about designing in RF-SOI, there’s a great short course coming up the day before and in conjunction with the EuroSOI-ULIS Conference in Granada, Spain.The title of this short course is RFSOI: from basics to practical use of wireless technology. Program and registration details can be found here. The course runs for the full day on Sunday, 18 March 2018.The talks, which are being given by a stellar line-up of experts, include: RF SOI, fabrication, materials and eco-system - Ionut Radu Director of Advanced R D, Soitec Fundamentals of RF SOI technology - Jean-Pierre Raskin, Professor, UCL 22nm FDSOI Technology optimized for RF/mmWave Applications - David L. Harame, RF CTO Development and Enablement, GlobalFoundries RF SOI technology and components for 5G connectivity - Christine Raynaud, Program Manager (Business Development – Technology to Design), CEA-Leti Analog and RF design on SOI - Barend van Liempd, Senior Researcher, imec Techniques and tricks for RF measurements on SOI - Andrej Rumiantsev, Director RF Technologies, MPI Corporation FOSS TCAD/EDA tools for advanced SOI-device modeling - Wladek Grabinski, R D CM Manager, MOS-AK RF design flow for SOI - Ian Dennison, Design Systems Senior Group Director, Cadence The course is being organized by SOI Consortium members Incize and Soitec. BTW, this year marks the 4th joint EUROSOI – ULIS Conference. The EuroSOI Conference, which has been ongoing for decades, is well paired with the ULtimate Integration on Silicon Conference. The joint conference provides an interactive forum for scientists and engineers working in the field of SOI technology and advanced nanoscale devices. One of the key objectives is to promote collaboration and partnership between different players from academia, research and industry. As such, it covers technical topics, industry trends and updates from pertinent European programs. EuroSOI-ULIS will take place 19–21 March 2018 at the University of Granada in Spain. For information on the program and how to register, see the website. Following the conference, the papers will be available at the IEEE Xplore® digital library, and the best papers will be published in a special issue of Solid-State Electronics.

GlobalFoundries' 45nm RF-SOI platform is qualified and ready for volume production on 300mm wafers (read the company's full press release here). It was just at the beginning of last year that GF announced the PDK availability for 45RFSOI (we covered it here). Now there are several customers engaged for this advanced RF SOI process, which is targeted for 5G mmWave front-end module (FEM) applications, including smartphones and next-generation mmWave beamforming systems in future base stations. In case you missed it, at the Consortium's Shanghai symposium GF's Mr. RF -- Peter Rabbeni -- gave a great talk on the company's RF-SOI capabilities, which are very impressive (they've shipped over 32 billion RF-SOI devices, after all). His slides from that day are available here on the SOI Consortium website. See his slide 12 for an indication of how 45RFSOI fits into the overall picture. [caption id="attachment_11482" align="alignnone" width="768"] Slide 12 from Peter Rabbeni's talk at the RF-SOI Symposium in Shanghai. (Courtesy: GlobalFoundries and the SOI Consortium).[/caption] As they explain it, next-generation systems are moving to frequencies above 24GHz, so higher performance RF silicon solutions are required to exploit the large available bandwidth in the mmWave spectrum. GF’s 45RFSOI platform is optimized for beam forming FEMs, with features that improve RF performance through combining high-frequency transistors, high-resistivity SOI substrates and ultra-thick copper wiring. Moreover, the SOI technology enables easy integration of power amplifiers, switches, LNAs, phase shifters, up/down converters and VCO/PLLs that lowers cost, size and power compared to competing technologies targeting tomorrow’s multi-gigabit-per-second communication systems, including internet broadband satellite, smartphones and 5G infrastructure. Psemi and Anokiwave are among those companies at the forefront of 45RFSOI use. Citing the drive to deliver faster, higher-quality video, and multimedia content and services Anokiwave CEO Bob Donahue said, “GF's RF SOI technology leadership and 45RFSOI platform enables Anokiwave to develop differentiated solutions designed to operate between the mmWave and sub-6GHz frequency band for high-speed wireless communications and networks.” The production line is in East Fishkill, N.Y.

EDA companies Cadence, Synopsys and Silvaco all gave excellent presentations at the SOI Consortium forums in Nanjing and Shanghai.Here's a recap of what the Cadence folks said. (I'll cover the Synopsys and Silvaco presentations in my next posts.)Design WinsAt the Shanghai FD-SOI Forum. Dr. Qui Wang, VP Chief of Staff, talked about FD-SOI Foundry Enablement: From Concept to Mass Production. Cadence, he reminded the packed ballroom, is not just EDA, but also system design enablement targeting verticals. “We’re ready!” he stated.In the last three years, they’ve done a lot of work on FD-SOI, he said, even working with ARM, GF and Dream Chip on the demo board as a reference design for automotive or vision applications, to show real data to their customers. It uses a quad implementation of the configurable Tensilica Vision P6 core.To simplify back biasing for the library folks, they worked with the foundries to create interpolations. And as Cadence is traditionally strong in RF/mixed-signal, there’s a new back-biasing tool to simplify board-chip communications, and make the bridge between power and thermal analysis.Cadence Has It All Jonathon Smith, Director of Strategic Alliances at Cadence, presented Enabling an Interconnected Digital World -- Cadence EDA IP Update at the Nanjing SOI summit. As he explained, his job is to ensure that design customers can use Cadence tools effectively, not just with Cadence IP, but also with 3rd party IP for the foundry nodes.He pointed out that the numbers for IoT predictions vary widely, and that industrial IoT (IIoT) will probably account for about 10% of the market. What is sure is that it will contain a large mixed-signal component (RF/digital/analog) and complex packaging.His customers want to know how fast and easy it is to work in FD-SOI. “Cadence custom and digital tools are ready for FD-SOI,” he said. They have the PDKs and tech files, and the EDA tools are enabled. The reference flows (both digital and custom analog) are tested and ready (Cadence customers who use p-cells and RF look especially for a good mixed-signal flow). [caption id="attachment_11432" align="alignnone" width="768"] EDA requirements for FD-SOI are complete. (Courtesy: Cadence SOI Consortium)[/caption] Customers also ask for proof points, and want to know the number of tape-outs they’ve done, performance benchmarks for working silicon and proven IP: this is what gives designers confidence, he said. Examples like Dream Chip’s Computer Vision Processor Chip Design for automotive ADAS CNN applications in 22nm FD-SOI (which they announced at Mobile World Congress in 2017 – see the press release here) have really helped build confidence further, he observed. (In case you missed it, DreamChip presented at the Silicon Valley SOI event in April 2017 – you can get that presentation here.)Cadence sees SOI as a driving force in IoT markets. They’ve also had some big digital wins recently, he added, and have made some major announcements with the foundries.For example, in September, they announced that their set of Design for Manufacturing (DFM) tools (signoff solutions) are now qualified on Samsung’s 28nm FD-SOI. This enables customers to create complex, advanced-node designs for the automotive, mobile, IoT, high-performance compute (HPC) and consumer markets (read the press release here). The Samsung Foundry's PDKs for 28nm FD-SOI are available for download now and incorporate the Cadence Litho Physical Analyzer (LPA), Physical Verification System (PVS) and Cadence CMP Predictor (CCP). In addition to signoff quality, the Cadence DFM tools offer an integration with the Virtuoso® platform and the Innovus™ Implementation System, providing designers with automated fixing capabilities and overall ease of use.And in October, Cadence announced that its digital and signoff flow, from synthesis to timing and power analysis, supports body-bias interpolation for GlobalFoundries 22FDX™ (read the press release here). The Cadence® tools enable advanced-node customers across a variety of vertical markets—including automotive, mobile, IoT and consumer applications—to use GF’s FD-SOI architecture to optimize power, performance and area (PPA).Cadence tools for ST’s 28nm FD-SOI foundry process were ready in 2016, btw – there’s a nice video testimonial from ST on power signoff, for example, which you can see here.

They're calling it, “The most advanced, lowest power-consuming GPU-enabled MPU on the market.” It's NXP's new i.MX 7ULP general-purpose processor, and it's on 28nm FD-SOI. They've got a nifty video summing it all up – you can watch it here. [caption id="attachment_10388" align="alignleft" width="300"] NXP is first to market with a general-purpose processor on FD-SOI: the i.MX 7ULP. It's got both ultra-low power consumption and rich graphics for battery powered applications. (Courtesy: NXP)[/caption] With the i.MX 7ULP, NXP is first to market with an FD-SOI applications processor offering the industry’s lowest power consumption. The debut was made at the recent Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg, Germany, and it made a big splash in media across the globe. (Read the full press release here.) In deep sleep mode, it boasts power consumption of just 15 uW or less: 17 times less than previous (and highly successful) low power i.MX 7 devices. Dynamic power efficiency is improved by 50 percent on the real-time domain.The i.MX 7ULP applications processor family is currently sampling to select customers. Broader availability of pre-production samples is scheduled for Q3 2017.Hello, IoT!The high-performance, low-power solution is optimized for customers developing applications that spend a significant amount of time in standby mode with short bursts of performance-intense activity that require exceptional graphics processing. Sounds like IoT – and indeed it is, and more.With the i.MX 7ULP, NXP's targeting wearables, portable healthcare, smart home controls, gaming accessories, building automation, general embedded control and IoT edge solutions. Bottom line: it's designed to enable ultra-low-power and secure, portable applications – especially those demanding long battery life. (Read the current fact sheet here.)The detailsThe i.MX 7ULP features an advanced implementation of the ARM® Cortex®-A7 core, the ARM Cortex-M4 core, as well as a 3D and 2D Graphic Processing Units (GPUs). It's got a 32-bit LPDDR2/LPDDR3 memory interface and a number of other interfaces for connecting peripherals, such as WLAN, Bluetooth, GPS, displays, and camera sensors. [caption id="attachment_10387" align="alignnone" width="834"] (Courtesy: NXP)[/caption] NXP says this new design, based on FD-SOI’s lower voltage capability, enables rich user experience through extremely power-efficient graphics acceleration, a fundamental requirement in many of today’s consumer and industrial battery-operated devices that incorporate robust graphic interfaces. Further enablement includes rich Linux or Android ecosystem with the real-time capability supported by FreeRTOS.Leveraging body biasing and moreNXP credits the design’s extreme low leakage and operating voltage (Vdd) scalability to that FD-SOI specialty: reverse and forward body biasing (RBB/FBB) of the transistors, and its smart power system architecture.In presenting the new i.MX 7ULP to the tech press, the company highlighted the following FD-SOI design advantages: Large dynamic gate and body biasing voltage range Domain and subsystem optimization with custom standard cell library with mixed voltages Low quiescent current (Iq) bias generators Enhanced ADC performance with unique FD-SOI attributes Fail Safe I/O for simplified low power system design To that, add a note about security. As the chip's fact sheet says, “The processors deliver hardware-enabled security features that enable secure e-commerce, digital rights management (DRM), information encryption secure boot, and tamper detection.” Those are just the sort of things that demand the bursts of high performance that dynamic forward body biasing delivers where and when it's needed.Samsung fabs, Verisilicon adds IPTwo other SOI Consortium members – Samsung and Verisilicon – are particularly pleased with NXP's results.“We are excited that NXP is the first to bring the benefits of FD-SOI (28FDS) technology to the general purpose market,” says Ryan Lee, VP of the Foundry Marketing Team at Samsung Electronics. “28FDS technology will satisfy a growing and critical need for ultra low power designs that require power-performance at very low voltages. We plan to evolve 28FDS technology to a differentiated low-power single platform by implementing RF and embedded Non-Volatile Memory (eNVM) solution for our customers’ success.”NXP’s processor design enables robust low power graphics for the IoT and wearable markets through two graphic processor units (GPU) from Vivante: the GC7000 NanoUltra 3D GPU with a low power single shader, and the GC320 Composition Processing Core (CPC) for 2D graphics. The 3D GPU plays a critical role in enabling rich 3D based user interfaces, while the CPC can accelerate both rich 3D and simpler 2D user interfaces. Processors based on the combination of the two GPUs enable efficient display systems which offload and significantly reduce system resources, in turn providing rich user interfaces at low power levels to extend the battery life of devices.“Our 3D GPU is a result of a joint collaboration between Vivante and NXP to deliver industry-leading 3D capabilities with the lowest power consumption,” said Wei-Jin Dai CEO at Vivante Corporation and Chief Strategy Officer and GM of the IP Division at Verisilicon. “The power savings from using the right GPU in an ultra low power processor is one of the major attributes and advantages of the architecture.”So, now shall we dig in a little deeper into the “why FD-SOI” question? Read on in Part 2 of this article.-- By Adele Hars, ASN Editor-in-Chief

By: Tamer Ragheb,Digital Design Methodology Technical Manager at GlobalFoundries and Josefina Hobbs, Senior Manager of Strategic Alliances, Synopsys It’s clear that getting an optimal balance of power and performance at the right cost is foremost in the minds of designers today. Designers who want either high performance or ultra low-power, or ideally both, have a choice to make when it comes to migrating to next generation nodes. For applications that push the envelope in performance, FinFET would be the optimal solution. For applications that require ultra low-power and more RF integration, FD-SOI is the right solution. The two technologies have different value propositions that need to be considered while designing for applications ranging from high-performance computing and server to high-end mobile and Internet of Things (IoT). GlobalFoundries 22FDX is the industry’s very first 22nm FD-SOI platform. The 22FDX technology is specifically designed to meet the ultra low-power requirements of the next generation of connected devices. The big advantage of this platform is its ability to provide software control at the transistor level through flexible body-biasing (Fig. 1). The ability to provide real-time trade-offs between power and performance via software-controlled body-biasing of the transistor creates new options for the designer. For example, imagine designing a processor for a Smartwatch that could match its power-performance tradeoff to your typical use and modify its performance based on how you’re using it that day. [caption id="attachment_9473" align="alignleft" width="610"] Figure 1: Benefits of 22FDX body-biasing[/caption] The full impact of the body bias capability of 22FDX becomes clear when compared to incumbent high-performance process technologies (Fig. 2). 22FDX compared to a 28nm high K metal gate (HKMG) technology can provide up to 50% less power at the same frequency, or 40% faster performance at the same total power than 28HKMG. In addition, 22FDX can be further optimized with forward body bias, shown on the blue curve, to further reduce the power or to further boost the speed in a turbo operation mode. [caption id="attachment_9474" align="alignleft" width="610"] Figure 2: 22FDX Body Bias Optimizes Performance and Power[/caption] In addition to the body bias, 22FDX offers capabilities for design flexibility and intelligent control that are not available in other technologies. These include: Improved electrostatic control of the transistor acts as a performance booster and enables lower VDD (i.e., lower power consumption) while reaching significant performance Low variability and body-biasing capability that can achieve 0.4 volt operation Complete RF enablement with ‘knobs’ to reduce RF power by up to 50 percent Manufacturing success is highly sensitive to specific physical design features, with advanced nodes requiring more complex design rules and more attention to manufacturability issues on the part of designers. However, there are essentially no additional manufacturing requirements to design in 22FDX beyond what is required for 28nm designs. There are four application optimized extensions available with 22FDX (Fig. 3). These are: 22FDX ULP- an ultra low-power extension that provides logic libraries and memory compilers that are optimized for 0.4 volt operation. 22 FDX ULL- an ultra low-leakage extension that brings in an expanded device suite capable of achieving one pico-amp per micron leakage. 22 FDX UHP- an ultra high-performance extension that leverages the overdrive capabilities and body-biasing features to maximize the performance of technologies in a turbo or a burst mode. It has high performance libraries and high speed interfaces and BEOL stacks optimized for competing architectures or applications. 22 FDX RFA- an RF and analog extension that brings in full characterization and enablement for RF applications, including optimized RF layouts and P cells, BEOL passives, and IP for Bluetooth LE and WIFI applications. [caption id="attachment_9475" align="alignleft" width="610"] Figure 3: 22FDX Platform and Extensions[/caption] GlobalFoundries reference flow for 22FDX has been optimized to support forward and reverse body bias (FBB/RBB), which provides the design flexibility to optimize the performance/power trade-offs. The reference flow supports implant-aware and continuous diffusion-aware placement, tap insertion and body bias network connectivity according to high voltage rules, double-patterning aware parasitic extraction (PEX), and design for manufacturing (DFM). This provides designers with the flexibility to manage power, performance and leakage targets for the next-generation chips used in mainstream mobile, IoT and networking applications. GlobalFoundries has been collaborating with Synopsys to enable and qualify their tools for the 22FDX Reference Flow. The recent qualification of Synopsys’ Galaxy™ Design Platform for the current version ofGlobalFoundries’ 22FDX technology allows the designer to manage power, performance and leakage and achieve optimal energy efficiency and cost effectiveness. Synopsys’ Galaxy Design Platform supports body biasing techniques throughout the design flow, including both forward and reverse body bias, enabling power/performance trade-offs to be made dynamically and delivering up to 50% power reduction. Key tools and features of the Galaxy Design Platform in the 22FDX reference flow include: Design Compiler® Graphical synthesis with IEEE 1801 (UPF) driven bias-aware multi-corner multi-mode (MCMM) optimization Formality® formal verification with bias-aware equivalence checking IC Compiler™ and IC Compiler II™ layout with physical implementation support for non-uniform library floorplanning, implant-aware placement, multi-rail routing, and advanced power mesh creation StarRC™ parasitic extraction for multi-rail signoff with support for multi-valued standard parasitic exchange format (SPEF) PrimeTime® timing analysis and signoff including distributed multi-scenario analysis (DMSA) static timing and noise analysis, using AOCV and POCV technology IC Validator In-Design physical verification The 22FDX technology leverages existing design tools such as the Galaxy Design Platform, manufacturing infrastructure and the broader design ecosystem. This speeds time to market and enables the creation of differentiated products.