Consumers, we've shrunk down the chips - Company Business and Marketing

CommunicationsWeek International, Nov 27, 2000 by Roy Rubenstein

Demands for extra functions on portable information terminals, have seen designers' advances in chip design make their job a whole lot harder.

The ability to control all of an end-user's corporate applications through a single portable device is now a real prospect.

Instead of laboring under the weight of a notebook, personal digital assistant and mobile handset, the emergence of mobile smartphones will deliver voice and Internet services through both cellular and short-hop Bluetooth wireless connectivity.

What is allowing such capabilities in a portable are developments in integrated circuits and in particular "system-on-chip" design.

Advanced chip design

Digital circuit designers can put on one chip whole systems which previously required several discrete chips, all the result of the semiconductor industry's progress in shrinking the feature size of transistors, the building blocks of integrated circuits. That at least is the theory.

"System-on-chip has become so complex," said Jim Tully, chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest, of Egham, England. "[What] semiconductor vendors... can now place on chip is racing ahead of the design technology [required to exploit such silicon real-estate]."

As a result, it is getting harder to design system-on-chips and meet market opportunities. "The only way to close this gap is to massively reuse predefined circuit blocks," said Tully.

This is where companies like Parthus Technologies plc, of Dublin, Ireland, come in. Parthus has worked with handheld organiser producer Psion plc of London to develop a mobile Internet-on-a-chip platform called InfoStream which it has just unveiled.

"It is being aimed at applications such as wireless Internet devices and general packet radio system [GPRS] smartpbones," said Sean Mitchell, vice president of the infomedia business unit at Parthus. The design has also been licensed by Motorola Inc., of Schaumburg, Illinois, and Agilent Technologies Inc. of Palo Alto, California. "They can produce their own chips or add their own differentiated [circuitry]," said Mitchell.

Functionality without cost

For portable information terminals, "makers want to increase functionality, but customers don't want to pay more," said Theo Classen, chief technology officer of Philips Semiconductors, part of Royal Philips Electronics of Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

For example. global positioning system (GPS) technology, which by calculating a user's location enables location-specific services, means GPS and Bluetooth wireless connectivity has to be added.

"Bluetooth and GPS are extremely complex [circuit] engines," said Andrea Goumo, vice president of advanced system technology at STMicroelectronics NV of Geneva. Extra circuits take up space, making it difficult to meet handset makers' demands for ever smaller terminals. They also consume power, decreasing battery life.

"The real challenge is power consumption," said coumo. Not only does system-on-chip techniques reduce chip count and hence the design's overall size, it also reduces power consumption.

Parthus Technologies offers several circuit building blocks for Bluetooth, GPS and multimedia tasks such as Internet audio. The ability to integrate on-chip circuitry for data extensions is "certainly feasible" by 2002.

But whether this will happen is dependent on the market. If this proves a mass market requirement, then such functionality will "be sucked into a single chip," said Sean Mitchell. Otherwise, it may make more economic sense to start with a bulkier "multi-chip solution until the market develops."

The next challenge for designers will be third-generation mobiles. These will require chip designers to decide which functions are implemented using dedicated circuitry and which are executed in software running on a programmable microprocessor.

"People say this process [choosing between hardware and software] is scientific," said STM's Coumo. "But it is an art."