Electronics Weekly
‘Subramanian started at the macro level, pointing out that where GDP is growing the fastest in the world, per capita income is low.
“In the next three or four decades people with incomes of $6,000 to $30,000 will be dramatically increasing,” said Subramanian.
‘He thought this growth would peak in China during this decade and in India during the decade after next.
“170 people join the middle class every day,” he said.
‘The consequence of all this, said Subramanian, is that: “Electronics companies are pushing emerging economy price points which are pushing platforms to deep nanometer nodes.”
‘Subramanian pointed out that 80% of the industry’s revenues came from 90nm parts and below, with the industry splitting into two groups: those companies which can command the high margins of mixed signal ASSPs; and the catalogue players.
‘Subramanian then moved onto the challenges facing SOCs in the shape of technical bottlenecks which need to be speeded up.
‘First, high speed I/O – like USB, SerDes and HDMI.
‘Second, clocking – PLLs, DLLs and putting multiple PLLs on a chip.
’Third, memory interfaces. NAND is going from tens of Mbits/sec to Gbits/sec because of the need to handle video.
‘Fourth, RF performance bottlenecks.
’Subramanian went on to address the problems in SCO design. Sub-90nm designers are using 1000x more simulation, he said. Scaling, he said, has now reached the point where physical effects start to dominate.
‘The key problems facing designers are noise, mismatch, variability and parasitics and here Berkley Design Automation provides, said Subramanian, “Very accurate analysis five to ten times faster than anyone else in the industry.”
