Single-chip system pushed

Electronic News, Sept 2, 1996 by Jim DeTar, Peter Brown, Judy Erkanat

San Jose, Calif.--The much-ballyhooed concept of system-on-a-chip development--combining logic, peripherals and memory on a single chip--is about to take a giant leap toward becoming reality with the announcement this week of the formation of the VSIA industry alliance. One thorny issue the alliance will immediately face is how to overcome process technology obstacles and roadblocks in other areas that have thus far thwarted combining memory and logic onto a single die.

On Tuesday of this week, a group calling itself the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA)--comprised of systems companies, as well as design software, semiconductor and intellectual property (IP) providers--will jointly announce they have banded together to accelerate growth of the system-on-a-chip industry.

Included in the alliance are such industry heavyweights as Digital Equipment Corp., National Semiconductor and Motorola on the systems/processors side; Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys and Mentor Graphics on the design software side; and chip vendors Advanced RISC Machines (ARM), MIPS Technologies, Fujitsu and Toshiba.

The primary objectives of the alliance, according to sources involved in formation of the group, are to drive standards they will jointly develop, and to ultimately create an open industry model for system-on-a-chip that will enable cooperation on development of macros that can be interchanged between companies creating chips for a broad variety of applications such as TVs, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and set-top boxes.

Although initially comprised of about 25 member companies, the alliance will be steered by a pilot group consisting of eight companies, similar to the organization of the IEEE 1394 standards group, which is steered by a committee of nine companies and now has a total membership of about 75 companies.

Timothy J. O'Donnell, president of ARM, a charter member of the VSIA alliance, said the development of system-on-a-chip has to be fully industry-driven if meaningful progress is to be made in integrating all the elements needed to do a complete system--whether it be a cellular phone or a portable computing system.

"It's got to be a joint effort," Mr. O'Donnell said. "The IP providers such as ARM are developing intellectual property and have to deliver it. To date, there is a fairly heavy effort to do that. ARM is one company that has learned how to do that better than most. Semiconductor companies need to obtain that (IP). The EDA (electronic design automation) guys have to put together the chips so semiconductor companies can build it (system on a chip). Groups like this will try to meet the needs of all these people."

Although unable to discuss the specific role ARM will play in the group because the members were asked to sign onto a non-disclosure agreement prior to this week's press event, Mr. O'Donnell said that system-on-a-chip technology has been evolving for some time and it is now a concept whose time has arrived.

"It's been evolving for some time now, especially with things like ARM, which is so small. You can put a lot of additional logic on a very small, cost-effective piece of silicon, less than 2 millimeters for some of the smaller cores."

When asked what specific factors are driving the long-discussed system-on-a-chip notion toward becoming reality at this time, Mr. O'Donnell replied: "With shrinking geometries you are able to put more cost-effective features on one piece of silicon. There is no one thing that is leading. If I look back at just the ARM's evolution, the ARM was a significant piece of silicon on its own. Now we are looking at 0.35-micron manufacturing and the portion (of chip needed) to do the ARM core is getting much smaller so you can put in your timers, Ethernet controllers, I/O controllers and A-to-D (analog to digital) and D-to-A on one piece of silicon.

"The only thing that really hasn't happened to date is putting memory on a chip. That's an interesting issue. The software design issues of one CPU per memory chip haven't really been addressed. (See related article on Intel Microcomputer Labs on page 6.) It's getting to where that the technology is at that point. In a single-chip solution, you can put in most everything you need for simple systems: RAM, ROM, I/O.

"One of the things that is more interesting is to take DRAM and put a processor on one DRAM. You can take an array of DRAMs and have a processor in each one--a parallel processing-type system in DRAM systems. But there are still software issues of parallel processing that haven't been solved."

From the design perspective, there is a need for some sort of infrastructure in the system-on-a-chip industry and the use of IP as building blocks, according to Steve Glaser, director of marketing development for Cadence Design Systems.

"Our vision and strategy is to have a business model and a technology model that will facilitate more extensive design reuse, design exchange, and investment in IP development," Mr. Glaser said. He added that the new industry initiative announced Sept. 2 is expected to address all aspects of the industry because, "More functionality is needed to take advantage of the advances made in manufacturing."