For the Want of a Nail: Lack of opto-RF, system-level tools and designers hampering EDA

Electronic News, Dec 3, 2001 by Gale Morrison

IC and systems companies working in the physical layer, where optical signals interface to digital electronics, are looking for more and better EDA tools to get their engineering done.

"The physical layer design represents one of the most challenging portions of the design of high-speed terabit routers," said Leo Wong, director of strategic marketing at BitzBlitz Communications Inc., a two-year-old, venture-funded CMOS transceiver specialist.

"To maintain signal integrity, you need to measure EMI, you need the people that are able to design transmission lines, and you need the ability to measure the bit error rate when sometimes the link is broken down," Wong said.

"This is all very specialized knowledge--not to mention the expense of the equipment." Not every company can afford, or knowledgeably use, an Agilent or Anritsu bit error rate tester, he said.

BitzBlitz last week announced OpticalBlitz, a program to qualify its transceiver and that of other companies in the high-speed optical modules coming from Agilent, Alvesta, Blaze Network, Ignis Optics, Molex, Network Elements, PicoLight and Pine Photonics.

Wong said that the BitzBlitz engineering team, made up of Agilent's Gigabit Ethernet optical module team and other engineers from Vitesse and Altera, needs more EDA tool support for the job of integrating to optical communications.

"It's a nontrivial portion of a system's design. [The design simulation and verification] needs to go down to the device level. But there is no really good tool for RF system-level design. A lot of these are really handcrafted, experience-driven designs," Wong said. But this deficit has turned into a market opportunity for BitzBlitz. The company's reference board and test data package sells for $5,000, though this is probably artificially low to get people evaluating BitzBlitz TSMC-produced serializer/deserializer ICs.

The problem of gaps in the RF design offerings is not confined to optoelectronics. Bluetooth IC design teams are finding this true, too, according to Jarvis Tou, VP of marketing and product management at Silicon Wave Inc. (see story, page 20). Tou ran Intel's Bluetooth program, which sought to buy and promote Blue-tooth capability, not design ICs for it, until nine months ago when he jumped over to Silicon Wave.

"There are RF tools, but there are very few. And there's very few that are any good," Tou said.

Incidentally, BitzBlitz's Wong said the scarcity of tools and the people to do this integration work brought out semiconductor venture capitalist Irwin Feder-man at US Venture Partners to back BitzBlitz.

Federman led Monolithic Memory Inc. for almost a decade before selling the company to Advanced Micro Devices. MMI funded Cypress Semiconductor, Xilinx and Altera as start-ups. At USVP Federman led investments into MMC Networks (the management of which now leads AMCC, the company that acquired MMC) and SanDisk.

BitzBlitz at a Glance

* Founded in 1999

* Venture-funded

CMOS transceiver company