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EE TimesTHE NEWS

SOURCE FOR THE CREATORS OFTECHNOLOGY

ISSUE 1603 MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011 WWW.EETIMES.COM

Tablet wars (aka Computex 2011) 12

June 6, 2011 Electronic Engineering Times 3

CONTENTS JUNE 6, 2011

OPINION 4 Commentary

Is a media tablet a PC?

50 Last WordSpace exploration is amarathon, not a sprint

NEWS OF THE TIMES 7 Renesas Mobile CEO

banking on LTE for marketshare growth

10 Intel Ultrabooks attack tablet market

12 The tablet wars (aka Computex 2011)

GLOBAL WATCH 16 ST keeps faith in wireless

‘big chips in the middle’

COVER STORY 18 Touch mania

swipes across markets

INTELLIGENCE 26 Algae yields hydrogen fuel

28 HP discovers memristormechanism

DESIGN + PRODUCTS Global Features

31 3-D IC design: New possibilities for wireless

33 Creating stereoscopic 3-Dfor mobile devices

37 Under the Hood: Wide Bluetooth, Wi-Fi adoptionseen in handsets

41 Planet Analog: Are you violating your op amp’sinput common-mode range?

EE LIFE 47 Pop Culture: Engineering for

kindergarteners

48 Investigations: Knee-deep in exploding mice

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4 Electronic Engineering Times June 6, 2011

COMMENTARY

Some analysts categorize mediatablets separately and are projectingthat the tabs will undercut PC sales in2011. Market research firm IHS iSup-pli, for example, recently reported thatfirst-quarter PC sales slipped a bit fromlast year’s first-quarter numbers, inpart because of rising interest inmedia tablets.

Clearly, the media tabletis a phenomenon that ismaking a big impact onthe PC market. Whetherit’s lifting or hurting thatmarket, however, dependson your perspective.

So is a media tablet a PCor not? This being 2011, itmight be useful to turn toWikipedia, the defaultreservoir of knowledge onall topics, which definesthe personal computer as“any general-purpose com-puter whose size, capabili-ties and original salesprice make it useful forindividuals, and which isintended to be operateddirectly by an end userwith no intervening computer opera-tor.” It continues:

PCs include any type of computer that isused in a “personal” manner. This is incontrast to the batch processing or time-sharing models, which allowed large,

expensive mainframe systems to be used by many people, usually at thesame time, or large data processing sys-tems, which required a full-time staff tooperate efficiently.

By that definition, a tablet wouldappear to qualify. But so would a lot ofother things that aren’t mainframes

(does anyone use main-frames anymore?). AniPod might make the cut.

The Wikipedia defini-tion goes on to say:

A personal computer maybe a desktop computer or[a] mobile type, for exam-ple a laptop, tablet PC orhandheld PC (also calleda palmtop) that is smallerthan a laptop.

Palmtop? Was this writ-ten in 1996? Someonereally ought to takeadvantage of the collabo-rative nature ofWikipedia and update itsPC definition in language

recognizable by today’s reader. The Wikipedia entry includes a sub-

section for tablet PCs:

A tablet PC is a notebook or slate-shapedmobile computer. Its touchscreen orgraphics tablet/screen hybrid technology

allows the user to operate the computerwith a stylus or digital pen, or a finger-tip, instead of a keyboard or mouse. Theform factor offers a more mobile way tointeract with a computer. Tablet PCs are often used where normal notebooksare impractical or unwieldy, or do notprovide the needed functionality.

Aha! Right? Well, not exactly. For one thing, the photo used to illus-

trate the tablet PC is an HP Compaqtablet PC with a rotating/removablekeyboard. The photo was taken in 2006.And many people tend to differentiatebetween a tablet PC (read, runs Win-dows) and a media tablet, such as theiPad or Android-based tabs.

With the rapid evolution of technolo-gy and rising prominence of mobility,the lines between product categoriesare blurring beyond recognition. Goodluck, these days, drawing distinctionsamong notebook PCs, netbooks, tabletsand even, in some cases, e-readers.

Does it really matter? Yes and no. Yes, because while the PC market’s

usual suspects—Acer, Dell, HP and thelike—are all scrambling to put out com-pelling tablets, so are a lot of other com-panies. They include handset vendorslike Research in Motion and Motorola,electronics giants like Samsung, andeven—depending on your definition ofa tablet—booksellers like Amazon andBarnes and Noble. (Apple is obviouslyfar and away the leader in tablets, butwhile Apple’s roots are in personal com-puting, today it’s a consumer electronicsvendor that happens to sell personalcomputers [don’t let Apple hear you callits computers PCs].)

In another sense, though, it doesn’treally matter whether a tablet is a PC.To IC Insights’ point, tablets, like tradi-tional PCs, consume a lot of chips.Whether you consider them PCs or youdon’t, their popularity is a good thingfor the chip market.

How good a thing? Again, it dependson your perspective, since the tablet,unlike the traditional, Wintel PC, hasopened the game to a whole host ofARM-based processors. And all of them,at this very moment, are fighting hardfor market share. p

By Dylan McGrath ([email protected]), editor of EETimes.com.

A new report published by market researchfirm IC Insights Inc. postulates that PC saleswill grow by 13 percent in 2011, thanks in partto strong projected growth of Apple Inc.’s iPadand other media tablets. The report calls to the forefront the question of whether tabletsbelong in the PC category or are something else entirely.

Is a media tablet a PC?Does it matter?

Good luck,these days,drawingdistinctionsamongcategories

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OF THE TIMES

Qualcomm

23%

Other

10%

TI

14%

Infineon

8%

ST-Ericsson

7%

MediaTek

7%

Broadcom

6%

Samsung

4%

Maxim

3% Renesas

3%

RFMD 3%STMicro 2%Skyworks 2%Omnivision 2%Marvell 2%Aptina 2%Freescale 2%

National

1%

Synaptics

1%

Avago

1%

Cypress

1%

CSR

1%

Toshiba

1%

Spreadtrum

1%

Sony

1% Triquint

2%

Top-tier cellular chip vendor rank by 2010 revenue

SOURCE: Forward Concepts

News

Renesas Mobile CEO banking onLTE for market share growthBy Junko Yoshida

TOKYO — Ikuyo Kawasaki, CEO ofmobile chip vendor Renesas MobileCorp., doesn’t just contradict the stereo-type of the reticent, retiring andinscrutable Japanese executive. Heknocks it clean off the shelf and thenkicks it around the office.

Renesas Mobile is only six monthsold but is already making noise—muchof it generated by Kawasaki. The chiefexecutive is outspoken in his ambitionto turn the company into a crediblecompetitor against Qualcomm, with a20 to 30 percent share of the global

handset market within the next fewyears (up from a negligible share today).

The catalyst for that growth, Kawasa-ki says, will be LTE. With his companywielding a proven and trusted LTE pro-tocol stack obtained from Nokia, theCEO likes his odds.

Renesas Mobile, created throughRenesas Electronics’ acquisition ofNokia’s modem business, already has1,900 employees, of whom only 550 areJapanese nationals. While no marketanalyst would put Renesas Mobile inthe same class with Qualcomm today,

none would underestimate Kawasaki,the architect behind the Renesas-Nokiamodem business merger. That deal sur-prised everyone and put Kawasaki onthe industry’s radar.

But his company has a long way togo. In a ranking of top-tier cellular chipvendors by 2010 revenue released lastweek, Will Strauss, president of For-ward Concepts, estimated RenesasMobile’s share at 3 percent.

“There’s no question that Qualcommis No. 1 in modems for 3G, HSPA+ (andCDMA); TI is No. 2 in 3G and HSPA(thanks to Nokia); and Renesas shouldtake over much of that after 2012, butnot much before then,” Strauss stated.

Samsung currently leads the field in LTE, ahead of Qualcomm and LGElectronics, Strauss added, but the LTElandscape continues to shift. While 19vendors have announced LTE baseband

INTERVIEW

NEWS OFTHETIMES

chips, Strauss noted, “only a few areactually shipping.” And “a single bigorder (like HTC’s Thunderbolt) canchange the LTE ranking.”

The 2010 cell phone chip markettotaled $55 billion; the figure includesresults for the second-tier companiesthat make chips for Bluetooth, GPS,power management and the like.

By choosing Nokia’s modem businessas its acquisition target, Renesas tippedits hand, according to a Japanese chipcompany executive who asked not to beidentified. “Renesas in essence told thewhole world that NTT Docomo, whilestill the most important client/partnerin the Japanese mobile world, is nolonger a partner Renesas can depend onto advance and execute its own globalstrategy,” the exec said.

Kawasaki, 53—young, by Japanesestandards, for a top executive—appar-ently isn’t cowed by the common wis-dom. An EE with degrees from TokyoUniversity and Washington State Uni-versity, Kawasaki joined Hitachi in 1982as a microcontroller designer. He ledseveral microprocessor developmentprojects, including the TRON, SH andSH-Mobile efforts. After a brief stint atNTT Docomo to lead the overseas hand-set business team in 2008, Kawasakitransferred back to Renesas Electronicsand became a corporate executive.

EE Times sat down with Kawasaki atRenesas Mobile headquarters here lastweek for an exclusive interview, duringwhich the CEO answered our questionswith a forthrightness not usually asso-ciated with a Japanese senior executive.Even when he disagrees, Kawasakidoesn’t quibble.

EE Times: With all due respect, todaythere are many commercially availablelicensable cores and protocol stacks forLTE. How is yours different?

Ikuyo Kawasaki: Developing a newmodem technology is no trivial task.Barriers to entry still remain high.

Typically, you start developing a newmodem technology in academia, work-ing your way through a collaborativeforum like 3GPP [the 3rd GenerationPartnership Project] to develop a stan-dard. Those who participate in the3GPP—our staff originally from Nokiaare also active members—foresee where

the new standard will land, perhaps fiveyears out.

Then, you work in partnerships withnetwork infrastructure vendors likeEricsson, Nokia-Siemens, etc., to matchup the specs. They see the technologyon the market three years out.

Then, you begin working with opera-tors and build the network together.

Again, some of our Nokia veteranshave established key interfaces withoperators throughout the world.

By the time you sit down with yourmobile handset clients to do business,much of the future direction—and the fate of design wins—has been pre-determined.

EE Times: At Mobile World Congressearlier this year, Renesas Mobileannounced a mobile application proces-sor using a dual-core implementation ofthe ARM Cortex-A9 MPCore and Imagi-nation Technologies’ multicore Pow-erVR series 5XT MP graphicstechnology. That sounds a lot like manyapplication processors we’re going tosee on the market in the comingmonths. Where’s your edge?

Kawasaki: Before talking about theapplication processor itself, let me talk

about the cloud era we are entering.The LTE network, at 100 Mbits/second,will essentially connect to cloud servic-es not just smartphones and mediatablets, but automobiles, game consoles,digital cameras. You’ll soon see everyclient device—well beyond thephone—with an LTE modem.

Just as Qualcomm understands thetelephone business, we believe thatRenesas Electronics understands sys-tems businesses. Our applicationprocessor will be designed into a num-ber of platforms, including cars, cam-eras, game consoles and other digitalconsumer devices across the board.

EE Times: When do you expect to seean LTE modem designed into devicesother than telephones?

Kawasaki: In 2013 and beyond.

EE Times: Many in the semiconduc-tor industry have talked about a “plat-form” business as a concept for manyyears. But ST-Ericsson CEO GillesDelfassy recently said that “many OEMshave begun changing their behaviorfrom buying components [from severalsuppliers] to [using] pre-integrated ‘plat-form’ chips from a single source.” Thistrend has become increasingly clearonly in the last year or so, according toDelfassy. Do you agree?

Kawasaki: Yes, absolutely. Our cus-tomers are no longer interested in hand-picking individual components. Theytell us to bring the entire platform solu-tion, including everything from modemto application processor and connectivi-ty chips, all thoroughly tested to workwell as a smartphone platform.

EE Times: I don’t see Renesas’ SHcore in your application processor.Whatever happened to that?

Kawasaki: It’s invisible to people, but it’s still there. SH functions as amultimedia controller, controllinggraphics and displays.

The operating system, however, runson ARM. As long as our customers usethe SH core, we will leave it in there,but once it becomes unnecessary we’lltake it out.

EE Times: Where are you manufac-turing your modem and application


‘You’ll soon seeevery client device—well beyond thephone—with an LTEmodem’

— Ikuyo Kawasaki

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NEWS OFTHETIMES

processor chips, and which geometryare you using?

Kawasaki: Our current modem chipand application processor both use a 45-nm CMOS process and are manufac-tured in two places: TSMC and Renesas’Naka fab. [The Naka fab was damagedby the recent earthquake.]

Our new single-chip modem/applica-tion processor will be mass-produced in2012 at TSMC using a 28-nm processtechnology.

EE Times: What do you see as Rene-sas Mobile’s challenge in the mediumterm?

Kawasaki: Right now, we’re getting alot of traction for our mobile SoCs.We’re bombarded with requests. Wealso laid out our road map to 2013 toour customers.

Our challenge is all about execu-tion—making sure to develop productsaccording to specs and on time.

EE Times: What about your long-term plans?

Kawasaki: Once our chips begin pene-trating the mobile handset market forLTE, we would like to contribute to theindustry by helping to establish a mar-ket where LTE chips get designed into avariety of devices other than phones, allconnected to cloud services. Whetherwith machine-to-machine or clientdevices for cloud services, we would liketo take a leadership role in the new era.

EE Times: Over the last six months,what have you learned from your Nokiacolleagues?

Kawasaki: Nokia has brought us aculture and infrastructure that are trulyglobal. Now at Renesas Mobile, youcould have a boss in Helsinki. Andwhen you need help for your team, youdon’t have to think twice about gettingsomeone from Bangalore.

They work together as a teamremarkably well over such a diversegeography and so many time zones. We have teams in Finland, Denmark,the U.K., France, Germany, China, India,Taiwan and the United States, in addi-tion to Japan.

And obviously, most of our employ-ees now need to be able to communi-cate in English. p


Intel Ultrabooks attack tablet marketBy Rick Merritt

PLATFORMS

STILL LACKING a design win in a top-tier tablet, Intel Corp. is taking anotherapproach: pushing down the power andsize of notebook computers. Meet theUltrabook, a slim, low-power laptopIntel described last week at the Compu-tex trade show in Taiwan.

The Ultrabook is a work in progress.Early versions will arrive in cases just20 mm thick and price points under$1,000 using versions of Intel’s 32-nmSandy Bridge processor. Asustek will beamong the companies to ship the sys-tems, with its UX21 debuting before theend of the year.

“We are very much aligned withIntel’s vision of the Ultrabook,” Asustekchairman Jonney Shih said in scriptedcomments at an Intel keynote at Compu-tex. “Transforming the PC into an ultra-thin, ultraresponsive device will changethe way people interact with their PC.”

The Sandy Bridge chips, shipping lat-er this year, will be Intel’s first to put anX86 and graphics core on the same die,sharing cache memory over a ring bus.Archrival Advanced Micro Devices issampling similar parts.

Ultrathin, low-power laptops run-ning integrated processors have beenaround for years. Intel aims to push theenvelope on the concept with newprocessors dedicated to such systems.

The move comes at a time when lead-ing tablets such as the Apple iPad,Motorola Xoom, Samsung Galaxy Taband RIM PlayBook all have adoptedARM-based chips. Intel launched a net-book and tablet division last year, but todate it has only garnered a handful ofsecond-tier tablet design wins.

The Ultrabook concept both showsIntel’s frustration at falling behind mar-ket trends and gives a gutsy “bring iton” call to leading tablet makers.Recently, Intel refocused its road maptoward mobile systems for both its Coreand Atom chips in an effort to catch up.

Ultrabook road mapIn 2012, Intel will ship versions of itsnext-generation Ivy Bridge processorsfor notebooks using its recentlyannounced 22-nm process technologywith trigate transistors. The 3-D transis-tors will provide gains in Mips/watt andsupport new chip- or system-level fea-tures that Intel has not yet disclosed.

By the end of 2012, as many as 40 per-cent of shipping consumer portable PCswill be Ultrabooks, Intel predicts.

A third step toward Ultrabooks willcome in 2013, when Intel ships Haswell,a second generation of 22-nm chipsusing a new microarchitecture. WithHaswell, Intel will shift its notebookdesign point from the current, 30- to 40-W operating target range down toabout 10 to 20 W.

Ultrabooks are designed forMicrosoft Windows and Apple’sMacOS. “We’ll look at Android if ourcustomers ask for it,” said Erik Reid,general manager of mobile client plat-forms at Intel.

“We believe the changes Intel is mak-ing to its road maps, together withstrong industry collaboration, willbring about an exciting change in per-sonal computing over the next fewyears,” said Sean Maloney, Intel’s newgeneral manager for China. Maloneymade the case that USB 3.0 and Thun-derbolt, both emerging in PCs now, arecomplementary I/O technologies.

Also at Computex, Intel showedsmartphone and tablet referencedesigns for its 32-nm Medfield, anAtom-based system-on-chip. The smart-phone will run the Gingerbread versionof Android; the tablet will run Honey-comb, still being ported to the X86.

Intel also showed tablet designsusing Oak Trail (Z670), a two-chip Atomplatform based on 45-nm technology.And it talked about Cedar Trail, its nextAtom-based platform for netbooks. p

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NEWS OFTHETIMES


The tablet wars (aka Computex 2011)By Robert Hollingsworth

IMAGEGALLERY

THE CURRENT ROSE in Taipei, Taiwan, last week on the 31stedition of Computex, the second largest computer show in theworld. The show attracted more than 2,000 exhibitors and anestimated 120,000 visitors to this tiny island. While no one candeny that this year’s crop of products is playing catch-up to thewildly successful Apple iPad, it is clear that creative minds arenot relying entirely on duplication of the Apple formula to winconsumer dollars.

Acer, SamsungFirst, let’s start with a very good pair of tablets—the Acer Iconiaand Samsung Galaxy Tab—that stand up well to form, fit, andfunction comparisons with the market leader in this category.The Samsung Galaxy Tab seemed to be a better solution for high-resolution activities like gaming, but since we couldn’t perform side-by-side comparisons, we’ll call this one a draw.Both solutions fit the basic definition of a tablet these days, andclearly both have been designed as high-quality products.

Asus The Asus Eee Pad Transformer appears to be an alternativedesigned for those of us who just cannot surrender the trustykeyboard in favor of touchscreen typing. At first glance, theTransformer looks like a typical netbook or notebook, but thebase/keyboard is really a docking station for the screen, whichcan be detached and then used as a tablet. When the screen isattached, not only can you type as if the device were a notebook,but the dock charges the tablet and offers USB ports so you canalso attach additional standard peripherals.

More AsusBut the Asus guys were not finished. They also developed a platform, called the Padfone, that combines a tablet with aphone. The phone can be used conventionally for calling andtexting, but when you want to explore the Internet or use afull-size tablet device for any application, you can install thephone in its customized slot, and the tablet taps the phone forconnectivity. A single SIM card in the phone serves both thephone and the tablet.

The Acer Iconia tablet.

The Samsung Galaxy tablet.

A diagram of the Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

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NEWS OFTHETIMES


FujitsuThe Fujitsu tablet PC solution—the only one of these devicesthat can truly be called a tablet PC, since it is an Intel CPUmachine running Windows—accomplishes the trick ofappearing to be a tablet by using a clever hinged mechanismthat lets the screen be used as a traditional notebook or, whenreversed, as a true tablet PC. It’s heavier than the other alternatives, but it shows how a PC can still provide legacyfunctionality while offering a touchscreen interface.

ViewsonicViewsonic’s demo of its Viewpad solution emphasized connectivity between the tablet and existing high-resolutionmonitors. Many of the other tablets shown at Computex support the same HDMI interface, enabling monitors and TVsto be connected to the tabs, but Viewsonic seemed to be theonly vendor showing off such connectivity as a standard partof its story. Viewsonic’s mascot Gouldian finches also stoodout as they wandered the Nangang Convention Center, tryingto attract traffic to its booth. Other vendors relied on themore traditional trade show technique, dressing attractiveyoung women in plastic clothing, to achieve the same result.

Robert Hollingsworth is senior vice president of SMSC, a semiconductor company based in Hauppauge, N.Y.

The Asus Eee Pad Transformer.

The Asus Padfone.

Fujitsu’shingedtablet.

Viewsonic’s Viewpad.


GlobalWATCH

BUSINESS

ST keeps faith in wireless‘big chips in the middle’By Junko Yoshida

As its rivals scramble to strikeM&A deals andintegrate acquiredIP, ST-Ericsson hasbeen there, donethat, notes CEOGilles Delfassy

growth is “in wireless.” “ST-Ericsson, built on a strong foun-

dation, has made a transition to thebest-in-class modems and applicationprocessors,” Bozotti said. He was refer-ring to the new Nova ARM-based appprocessors and Thor modems, in addi-tion to NovaThor, which combines amodem and app processor on one chip.

Delfassy described the customerresponse to the various products as“very strong.”

Components to platform chipsSouth Korean giant Samsung was thefirst customer for ST-Ericsson’s Thormodem chip, having designed it into theGalaxy 4G—the first HSPA+ 4G smart-phone capable of theoretical peak down-load speeds of up to 21 Mbits/second.

“There are more customers” for theThor chip, Delfassy said, though hewould not identify them.

Meanwhile, ST-Ericsson has signed upfive customers, including Nokia, for theNovaThor dual-core U8500 single-chipmodem/app processor, scheduled forlaunch in the second half, Delfassy said.

ST-Ericsson calls Thor the industry’smost advanced multimode modemsolution (LTE, FDD/TDD, HSPA+, TD,3G, 2G) available for handsets. Thedesign leverages modem-related intel-lectual property amassed from the com-pany’s joint venture partners.

In 2009, ST-Ericsson had “six differ-ent flavors” of legacy modems (includ-ing one from NXP, another acquiredfrom Nokia and three from the formerEricsson Mobile Platform), Delfassysaid. It has taken ST-Ericsson almosttwo years to sort out its embarrassmentof riches, settle on its preferences andimprove its operational efficiency.

Delfassy said Ericsson’s engineeringteam had taken a leadership role in theprocess and had complemented its ownmodem technology with NXP’s Vectorprocessor, whose architecture the teamassessed as “very clean.”

While the so-called platform strategyhas long been a mantra among mobilechip suppliers, only in the last year have“many OEMs begun changing theirbehavior from buying components

NEW YORK — As fellow Europeanchip maker NXP Semiconductors stakesits turnaround on what one of its seniorexecutives calls a “no big chip in themiddle” strategy, STMicroelectronics isbetting its future on a much broaderproduct portfolio. ST’s plans includesuch “big chips in the middle” as digitalTV SoCs and ST-Ericsson’s multimodemodem/application processor.

ST CEO Carlo Bozotti, six years intohis tenure as successor to the legendaryPasquale Pistorio, appears firmly in con-trol of his company’s destiny. Bozottilooked confident and relaxed as he ban-tered onstage with members of his man-agement team at ST’s recent Investorand Analyst Day here.

Bozotti has reason to feel upbeat. ST’sfirst-quarter results showed a solid start,with net revenue of $2.5 billion and agross margin of 39.1 percent, helped bythe company’s strong growth in analog,

MEMS and microcontroller revenue (a38 percent increase over the year-agofigure). But ST’s wireless revenuedropped 34 percent as ST-Ericsson’slegacy products suffered a bigger-than-expected decline in the market.

Clearly, Bozotti’s turnaround plan isonly halfway through to completion.

Gilles Delfassy, president and CEO ofST-Ericsson (born of the merger of Erics-son Mobile Platforms and ST-NXP Wire-less), is aware of the challenges. Thestatus of the business for which he isresponsible “is not at all where itshould be,” Delfassy said, adding thathitting the publicly promised break-even target in the second quarter of2012 is “not going to be easy.”

Nonetheless, Bozotti declared strongsupport for ST-Ericsson. While ST hastargeted “four growth areas,” includingenergy, health care, trust (security) andsmart devices, Bozotti said the real


MARKETS

ST’s ARM-based DTV platform leverages ST-Ericsson IPBy Junko Yoshida

NEW YORK — With Taiwanese ICsuppliers like MediaTek and Mstar rack-ing up design wins among China’s con-sumer electronics OEMs and ODMs, theset-top box and digital TV businesseshold less revenue potential, and thusless appeal, for many Western chipcompanies. The struggling financials ofTrident Microsystems and Zoran Corp.in recent quarters are a case in point.

Broadcom, however, remains com-mitted to the business, and Geneva-based STMicroelectronics plans to keepup its competitive position againstBroadcom with an offensive aimed atdigital TV, including Internet-connectedTVs and 3-D TVs.

At ST’s recent Investor and AnalystDay event here, CEO Carlo Bozotti citedDTV as among a handful of productareas considered central to the “the top-line evolution” of the company’s auto-motive, consumer, computer andcommunications infrastructure busi-ness. Other growth drivers, he said,include ST’s Power architecture-based32-bit microcontroller for automobiles;ST-developed, royalty-free display ports;and computer peripheral chips.

ST’s turnaround tactics over the pastfew years have included a review of theproduct portfolio, a focused approach toR&D, and the restructuring of manufac-turing operations, according to Bozotti.

One thing ST has done well is to exe-

cute the genuine “digital convergence”of IP cores and SoC blocks developed bydifferent groups of the company, partic-ularly ST-Ericsson’s app processordevelopment team and ST’s home enter-tainment and display (HED) group.

The HED group, headed by ST seniorexecutive vice president Philippe Lam-binet, is switching its processing corefrom the ST40 (based on the Hitachi-developed SH4 core) to ARM in its Gen4 platform, designed for open Internet-connected TV and scheduled for rolloutin 2012. ST-Ericsson has already portedthe ARM core to its ASIC library; theteam mapped the high-level descrip-tion, trimmed it and optimized it to ahigh-performance low-power process,thus hardening the core, said GillesDelfassy, president and CEO of ST-Erics-son. “We are sharing that with ST,” hesaid. Meanwhile, ST-Ericsson didn’thave to develop its own digital video oraudio codecs, instead acquiring vettedcores from ST’s HED group.

That strategy avoids the duplicationof engineering effort to optimize cores ordevelop specific blocks, and thus short-ens the development cycle. It’s a movestraight out of Broadcom’s playbook.And it demonstrates that if a company isdisciplined, a diversified product portfo-lio needn’t dilute the company’s marketpresence but in fact can strengthen it.

Lambinet said his group’s Gen 4

“Newman” chip reuses a block designedfor an ST-Ericsson chip. Using a dual-core 1.2-GHz ARM Cortex-A9, ST-Erics-son developed the core for its own SoC,which won a design slot in the SamsungGalaxy S II. Other notable blocks in theNewman chip include quad-core Maligraphics engines; motion-correctedtemporal interpolation and deinterlaceblocks that ST gained through its 2007acquisition of Genesis Microchip; and 3-D video, as well as 2-D to 3-D conver-sion capabilities.

‘Set-top box with a big screen’In response to an analyst question, Lam-binet said there’s still money to bemade in TV chips and asserted that ST’sdeep set-top expertise would strengthenits Internet-connected TV solutions.

“After all, connected TV is a set-topbox with a big screen,” he said. “That’swhy we think both ST and Broadcomwill do well in the growing Internet-connected TV market, whereas a com-pany like Trident, with much lesshistory in set-tops, will struggle.”

Lambinet acknowledged that the cap-tive TV chip market remains strong butpredicted that the sector will open up tomerchant vendors over time. Some TVmakers hit hard by the March earth-quake in Japan have turned to ODMselsewhere in Asia as they struggle to gettheir own plants back online, he noted. p

[from several suppliers] to [using] pre-integrated platform chips from a singlesource,” said Delfassy.

Pointing out that such consolidationvalidates ST-Ericsson’s belief in the wis-dom of “a complete platform approach,”Delfassy said most of its competitorshave been scrambling to accomplishM&A deals or “shopping around” for

modem and other IP. The flurry of suchactivity in recent months has includedIntel’s purchase of Infineon’s modembusiness, Nvidia’s Icera acquisition,Broadcom’s takeover of Beceem andQualcomm’s purchase of Atheros (for thelatter’s connectivity portfolio).

While the mobile chip marketremains cutthroat, Delfassy said it

would be “a challenge” for its competi-tors to integrate newly acquired IP,whereas ST-Ericsson has already “beenthrough that.” He added that “seven outof nine top handset vendors [in value]are engaged with us” despite the compa-ny’s fiscal setback.

“There are a lot of reasons to believein a great recovery soon,” he said. p


Touch mania swipes across marketsBy R. Colin Johnson

TOUCHSCREENS HAVE BEEN available since the days ofcathode-ray tubes, but the technology didn’t really catch onwith consumers until mobile phone makers adopted it tosolve the tiny-button problem. Now touchscreen smart-phones and tablets collectively constitute the fastest-growingelectronics market segment.

According to DisplaySearch (Santa Clara, Calif.), shipmentsof touchscreen tablets are forecast to reach 60 million units in2011 and could top 260 million units by 2016. Add to that themore than 400 million mobile phone touchscreens predictedby IHS iSuppli Corp. (El Segundo, Calif.), and the total marketcould top $10 billion this year (see sidebar, page 22).

“Touchscreens have been around for a long time, but theywere only popular in business and industrial settings, such as food service, airport kiosks and industrial keypads,” saidRhoda Alexander, director of monitor research at IHS iSuppli.

“The real transition for consumers … was when Apple movedinto smartphones and then tablets. Before then, consumertouchscreens didn’t work very well, because they had to oper-ate a standard OS. But with the move to smartphones andtablets, operating systems like iOS have enabled a very touch-friendly user interface.”

Google’s Android OS—the first major competitor to Apple’siOS—-did not support multitouch at introduction, but the lat-est incarnation accommodates a wide array of multitouch ges-tures. Some of them—including spin, thrust and slice—areunique to Android; all will work identically on any Androidsmartphone or touchscreen tablet. The BlackBerry Tablet OSand Windows Phone OS have similarly become touch-enabled.

“Handset makers used to give us a long list of obstacles toadopting touchscreens, but when Apple introduced theiPhone all those obstacles suddenly seemed surmountable,”said Andrew Hsu, technology strategist at Synaptics Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.). Synaptics began as an evangelist for thebenefits of touchpads as a substitute for a PC mouse but hassince reinvented itself as a touchscreen controller supplier formobile handsets. It claims a number of major design wins,including one in Google’s Nexus One smartphone.

Just a handful of contrary trends threaten the touchscreenindustry. Foremost are competing technologies that deliver asimilar user experience without the expensive touchscreenhardware, such as the 3-D gesture recognition made possibleby Microsoft’s Kinect gaming interface, which uses camerasand pattern recognition to sidestep the need for the sensorsrequired by handheld controllers. Kinect-like 3-D gesturerecognition, using infrared rangefinder technology Microsoftacquired from Canesta, is being downsized for Windowsphones and tablets. Armed with a touch-enabled version ofWindows that works across all device sizes—from its own 40-inch Surface to its licensed touchscreen tablets and smart-phones—Microsoft could redefine the touchscreen landscape.

Meanwhile, all the LCD makers are retooling their manu-facturing lines to incorporate touchscreen sensors directly

COVER STORY

Resistive

50%

Projectedcapacitive

31%Other

5%

Combo 2%Infrared 2%

Digitizer 1%On-cell 1%

Others 0.1%In-cell 0.02%

Source: DisplaySearch 2010 touchpanel market analysis

2009 touchscreen technologymarket share by revenue

Acoustic

3%

Opticalimaging

5%

Surfacecapacitive

5%

Touch sensor layerOne layer of glass ortwo layers of plastic,patterned with a matrix of overlappingwires made from a transparent conductingmaterial.

Display panelUtilizes one of several types ofLCD or OLEDtechnologies.

Touch controllerOne or more ICs(e.g., Atmel’s maXTouchcontroller) thatconnect to thesensing matrix onthe touch sensorlayer, andcommunicate touchcoordinates to thephone or tabletprocessor.

Protective coverMade of glass(e.g., Gorilla glass)or plastic. Does notusually contain anyelectronics orsensing wires.

Touchscreens consist of a transparent sensor layer attacheddirectly to the controller chip and sandwiched between a topglass cover and the display on the bottom.

SOURCE: Atmel

Flexible plastic overlayITO X-layer

Flexible insulating dotsITO Y-layer

Stable base layerLCD

Glass/film

Glass/film

ITO

ITOLCD

PSA

Y sensors

X se

nsor

s

Typical layer stacks for resistive (left) and capacitive (right) screens.

SOURCE: Cypress

Touchscreens areevolving toward

allowing multiple finger touches to

manipulate objectson-screen in much

the same way objectsmight be handled on

a real desktop.



COVER STORY

into their displays, a move that would eliminate the need fortoday’s OEM add-ons. Samsung and Nokia, for instance, havealready integrated touchscreens into organic LED displays fortheir respective Galaxy S and N8 smartphones.

Alternative materials for integrated touchscreen sensorsare also on the horizon, including Cambrios Technologies’ClearOhm transparent conductors, using silver nanowires;C3Nano’s carbon nanotube films; 3M’s copper-mesh films;repurposed polyethylenedioxythiophene conductive poly-mers; and epitaxial graphene films from a variety of vendors.All aim to slash the cost of touch sensors over the increasing-ly rare indium tin oxide (ITO) used for touch sensors today.

Supply chainTouchscreens’ runaway market appeal has given rise to amature worldwide supply chain in just a few years, encom-passing the manufacturing plants in Taiwan and Japan where

the transparent sensors are fabricated; the U.S. and Europeanmanufacturers of the controller chips that translate changes inresistance or capacitance into finger-down locations; and mod-ule makers and system integrators that add the clear cover,laminate the transparent films and integrate the electronics.

Legacy, resistive touchscreen technology uses two conduc-tive polymers on separate layers that can be deformed totouch each other wherever a finger or stylus touches the toplayer. Resistive controllers—which are available off the shelffrom Analog Devices, Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronicsand other mixed-signal chip makers—are relatively simpleand very accurate, but they do not usually recognize multipletouches. Divergent architectures have been developed forresistive touchscreens, using varying numbers of connectingwires (such as four-wire or eight-wire) to make the task sim-

pler or more accurate for specific applications.“Touchscreen technology is extremely diverse, with many

methods specialized for different applications; but in generalresistive is the legacy technology, while projected capacitive hasrecently become the industry leader,” said Jenny Colegrove, vicepresident for emerging display technologies at DisplaySearch.

Projected capacitive touchscreens rule the roost in high-end mobile devices. Smart appliances and security keypadshave no real need for capacitive touchscreens, however, andfor some applications even resistive touchscreens areoverkill. “Resistive touchscreens are still popular because of[the technology’s] maturity and low price point, whereas pro-jected capacitive still has some issues with yields and the lam-ination process for large-scale screens,” said IHS iSuppli’sAlexander. “As long as you have a variety of screen sizes,application environments, price points and use cases forthese devices, you are still going to need a variety of touch-

screen technologies available.”Projected capacitive technology drives

one plate of a transparent capacitor witha signal, then measures the results at theadjacent plate with an analog-to-digitalconverter. The capacitive sensors areusually cast in a diamond pattern, withone diamond-shaped capacitor plate oneach side of the glass or both on thesame side, using whisker-sized jumpers.A smartphone uses a couple of hundredcapacitive sensors and tablets up to 10times as many, making it possible for asmart controller chip to discern anynumber of touches at resolutions fineenough to detect even the smallestchild’s finger. Several controller makers,including Cypress and Integrated DeviceTechnology (IDT), are proposing propri-etary patterns that eliminate the needfor jumpers.

Multitouch gesture capability beganwith two fingers to zoom, three to scrolland four to swipe; it’s now become afree-for-all, as multitouch variations pro-liferate to enable finer manipulation of

on-screen objects. High-quality transparent sensor patternssupport smart gesture recognition, but the smarts originatein controller algorithms that debounce and condition the sig-nal from multiple fingers. The touchscreen controller sendsthe information to the application processor, which in turnidentifies gestures of varying complexity, such as tap- to-select, brush-to-scroll and pinch-to-zoom.

Taiwan and Japan today manufacture most of the world’shigh-end projected capacitive touchscreens. Taiwan’s Wintekand TPK Touch Systems (both Apple suppliers), along withfaster-growing siblings such as Young Fast and J-Touch (bothalso based Taiwan), account for the majority of worldwidetouchscreen shipments. Japanese suppliers Gunze, Suzutoraand DMC (located in Osaka but partnered with Austin-basedTouch International) are quickly ramping up competing

Intensity of signal denotes location of touchon each row and column

X sensor data intensity

Y se

nsor

dat

a in

tens

ity

In a capacitive touchscreen, the signal intensity levels for the rows andcolumns denote the touch location (which changes their capacitance).

SOURCE: Cypress

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COVER STORY

manufacturing operations, as are three dozen other touch-screen makers worldwide. Chinese manufacturers are not yetmaking high-end capacitive multitouchscreens, which are dif-ficult to use with a stylus, but have stuck with resistive touch-screens, which are better at rendering Chinese characters.

Touchscreen controller chips come from such suppliers asAtmel (San Jose, Calif.), which supplies Motorola’s Xoom,Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and many other Android-based tabletsand smartphones; Cypress Semiconductor (San Jose), whichsupplies RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook, the Barnes and NobleNook and dozens of smartphones, including HTC models;Synaptics, which supplies the IDEOS S7 Slim tablet as well as

many other Android and Windows phones; Broadcom(Irvine, Calif.), whose touch controllers are found in manyiOS devices, including the iPad 2; and Texas Instruments (Dal-las), whose touchscreen controllers are present in all iPhonemodels, including the iPhone 4, according to Chipworks.

Atmel takes the design win crown, having landed slots notonly in the Xoom and Galaxy Tab but also in LG’s G-Slate,Acer’s Iconia, Asus’ Transformer, Dell’s Streak and nearly everyother Android-based tablet, plus eight out of 10 of the world’stop smartphones, from HTC’s 4G Evo to Motorola’s Droid.

“Atmel has the fastest response time by a mile—300 com-pared with 70 samples/second—which means gestures are

“One out of three mobile phones uses atouchpanel in 2011,” said Jae Shin, mar-keting director of market research firmDisplaybank. That will increase to one outof every two phones by 2014, the marketresearch firm projects.

The touchpanel market this year willlog $10.42 billion in revenues, for 76 per-cent growth year on year. Panels less than10 inches will account for 89 percent oftotal 2011 revenues. Projected capacitivetouch technology is expected to accountfor 73 percent of the total touchpanelmarket in 2014.

At the Society for Information Display’sFuture of Touch conference last month,experts looked at what the next phases oftouch technology will bring to various mar-kets. John F. Jacobs, customer value chainmanager at Cisco Systems, suggestedthat developers ask the following ques-tions when weighing the relative merits ofthe various touchscreen approaches andtechnologies for their applications:

• What are the trade-offs betweenmultitouch and so-called touch 1.5(pinch-to-zoom) technologies?

• Do you really need “true” multi-touch?

• Is the feature set clearly defined early in the development process?

• How does the marketing “wish list”measure up against the user requirements?

• What are the “ideal” display size andresolution for the device?

• How will the device be held? Onehand or two? Cradled or gripped?

• How will it be operated? With fingers? Thumbs?

If one does not have ready answers tothose questions, then just providing touchcapability for its own sake in the productis not a worthy goal, according to Jacobs.

Bob Mackey, principal scientist atSynaptics, heeded the warning that theintegration of touch and the display hard-ware is of utmost importance. “You can’tjust have a great capacitive touch technol-ogy and not have an integration plan thattakes all elements into account,” saidMackey. “Remember, to a systems engi-neer, everything is part of a system.”

Toward that end, Mackey listed theperceived shortcomings of transparentconductors for capacitive touch sensing.“While volumes are increasing, pushingcosts down, capacitive touch sensing doesrequire transparent conductors—whichoften aren’t so transparent, and not veryconductive,” he said.

The required indium tin oxide (ITO) lay-er used in capacitive touch sensing maybe expensive, but it fits the existing supplychain and offers invisible patterns whenused with good index matching, said Mack-ey. No effective volume replacement forITO has been found, he added. For thefuture, however, Mackey looks to structuredmicro- or nanomaterials to offer a bettercombination of optical transparency andelectrical conductance than ITO provides.

Vernon Spencer, founder and manag-ing director of Visual Planet, offered hisown to-do list for moving touch technolo-gies forward. Because touchpanel

providers are pursuing divergentapproaches, Spencer cited the need forsuch basics as educating the developercommunity, arriving at common touchstandards, agreeing on definitions for multitouch and providing software devel-opment kits. “Hardware needs to coexist,and a high-profile multiuser productivitytool needs to be developed,” said Spencer.

Visual Planet specializes in the manu-facture of large (30- to 167-inch), flexibleprojected capacitive touchscreen foils,which Spencer said “work through anynonmetallic surface and create a fullyfunctional touchscreen.”

In a SID conference paper, researchersfrom FlatFrog Laboratories AB (Lund, Swe-den) cited drawbacks of projected capaci-tive systems. For one, the technology ishighly dependent on the availability ofindium, a rare and increasingly scarce ele-ment that is a key component of the ITOlayer in touchpanels. The supply issues forindium will continue to inflate the bill ofmaterials for projected capacitive touchsystems, the researchers predicted. Inaddition, the inherent properties of theITO layer itself impose size limitations andpose production yield issues that hinderdevelopment of cost-efficient projectedcapacitive multitouch systems at largersizes, according to the paper.

The researchers said FlatFrog’s planarscatter detection (PSD) approach main-tains the advantages of multitouch sys-tems without imposing the drawbacksnormally associated with projected capaci-tive or other optical touch systems. PSDapplies frustrated total internal reflection(FTIR) in combination with proprietaryoptical detection and advanced decodingalgorithms. — Nicolas Mokhoff

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COVER STORY

detected more accurately,” said Sherif Hanna, Atmel productmarketing manager. “We also have superfast first-touch laten-cy of 8 to 12 milliseconds—twice as fast as our competitors.”

Atmel’s main competition today comes from Cypress andSynaptics, but the field is about to get more crowded, sincenearly every other semiconductor maker with mixed-signalcapabilities wants in on the action. Industrial giant STMicro-electronics added a projected capacitive controller chip to itsS-Touch line last fall and will ship the device this summer.IDT this year announced its proprietary PureTouch technolo-gy, promising to lower the cost of capacitive touchscreens byusing a single layer of sensors rather than the two sensor lay-ers of expensive ITO required today. Cypress, too, is pitching asingle-sensor-layer solution with its TrueTouch technology.

Silicon Labs, which supplies the microcontroller in NextWin-dow’s optical touchscreens, is gearing up for projected capaci-tive touchscreens by creating a microcontroller that leveragesSiLabs’ know-how in surface capacitive technology for buttons.

“Right now our controllers are recognizing surface capaci-tance on individual buttons by measuring the capacitance ofone plate in relation to earth ground,” said Steve Gerber,director of human interface products at Silicon Labs. “For projected capacitive touchscreens, however, we need to meas-ure the projected capacitance between two plates, which forus means designing a specialized A/D converter peripheral,very similar to the surface capacitive touchpad block wealready have on our 8051-based microcontrollers.” The com-pany is currently sampling an 8051 with an integrated pro-jected capacitive touchscreen controller.

Freescale also has surface capacitive touchpad blocks onmany of its microcontrollers, including its newest line ofARM-based Kinetis MCUs, and has resistive touchscreen solu-tions based on its S08, ColdFire+ and i.MX processors.Freescale has not made any announcements about projectedcapacitive controllers but is likely to begin offering them asperipheral blocks on its microcontrollers by 2012.

Analog Devices offers a family of controller chips for low-

cost resistive touchscreens, making its touch controllers pop-ular in applications ranging from point-of-sale terminals tosmartphones. ADI also has expertise in capacitive touch tech-nology with its high-precision capacitance-to-digital convert-er (CDC), used for proximity sensing. Like Freescale andSilicon Labs, ADI has not yet announced entry into the con-troller market for projected capacitive touchscreens, but itsexpertise in noise management and its high-performanceCDC portend a projected capacitive touchscreen controllerannouncement, probably in 2012.

Beyond capacitanceFor the future, more than a dozen competing touchscreentechnologies-—from acoustic wave to near-field imaging—promise to sidestep the quirks of projected capacitive touch-screens for specialized input needs, such as those ofglove-wearing medical professionals. Among the companiesvowing to provide multiple types of touchscreens to meet thevarious vertical market requirements are Elo Touchsystems(Tyco Electronics) and 3M.

One of the most promising alternatives is optical touchtechnology, which uses ultralow-power infrared LEDs andphotodetectors to pinpoint gestures without requiring glassor ITO. NextWindow, for instance, supplies the touchscreencapability in the bezel around Hewlett-Packard’s TouchSmartPCs. Similarly, TI has partnered with Neonode Inc. (Stock-holm) to shrink the optical bezel profile to 1 mm high formobile device touchscreens.

TI has been in the touchscreen controller business sinceacquiring Burr-Brown a decade ago. Recently, TI announcedspecial models of its ultralow-power MSP-430 microcon-trollers with built-in support for both resistive touchscreensand surface capacitive touchpads. Now its collaboration withNeonode propels it into optical touchscreens. “Neonode’simplementation of optical touchscreens is almost a hybrid ofexisting resistive and capacitive touchscreen solutions, saidAdrian Valenzuela, team lead for TI’s touch portfolio. “You getthe form factor and response of capacitive—only a lighttouch is required, and gestures are easy to recognize—but it’sa lot more cost-effective, like a resistive display.”

Neonode’s first major design win for its zForce patentedoptical touchscreen came late last year in the Sony Reader.Kobo (Toronto) last month picked zForce for its eReader.

“Our technology is particularly well suited for e-readers,because zForce only consumes microamps of power in-between touch events,” said Thomas Eriksson, chief executiveofficer at Neonode. “Finger touches are detected wheneverthey break a beam, which uses much less power than eitherresistive or capacitive touchscreens. Also, since there are nooverlays on the screen itself, zForce doesn’t dim the lightreflected from E-Ink’s and Qualcomm’s e-reader displays.”

Chinese e-reader maker Hanvon recently announced avail-ability of its own electromagnetic resonance touchscreen.Hanvon claims OEMs choosing its proprietary dual-touch ERTneed only integrate antenna sensors on their circuit board toachieve the accuracy of resistive technology for stylus input ofChinese characters, while obtaining multitouch capabilitiesusually found only on projected capacitive touchscreens. p

Infrared LEDs feed photodetectors in a bezel aroundthe screen edges, sending beams of light across thetop of the touchscreen that when interrupted can beused to detect finger touches.

SOURCE: Neonode

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Intelligence

WITH A LITTLE BOOST from manmade nanopar-ticle catalysts, algae can produce hydrogen fuelfrom water and sunlight, according to engineers atthe U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne NationalLaboratory. Controlling the photosynthesis mecha-nisms through which algae harness the energy ofthe sun could enable the organisms to produceabundant fuel to power an emerging hydrogeneconomy, they say.

Led by Argonne National Lab chemist LisaUtschig, working with colleague David Tiede, theteam at Argonne’s Photosynthesis Group recentlydemonstrated how platinum nanoparticles can belinked to key proteins in algae to coax them intoproducing hydrogen fuel five times more efficient-ly than the previous record.

Photosynthesis usually produces natural plantfuels such as adenosine triphosphate, which canbe stored until it is needed for growth or respira-tion. By modifying the cycle with nanoparticle cat-alysts, the Argonne National Lab team hopes torepurpose algae by allowing them to producehydrogen fuel for storage and eventual use in fuelcells to produce electricity, Utschig said.

Argonne’s Photosynthesis Group has been aim-ing to reverse-engineer photosynthesis for 50years. Its current efforts are concentrating on thealgae protein plastocyanin, which forms thefoundation of algae’s primary photosynthesismechanism (photo-system-one, or PS1). Whenlight strikes PS1, it knocks out an electron, leav-ing behind a hole that the team sought to use tosplit water into hydrogen and oxygen. By addingthe platinum nanoparticle catalysts to the PS1mechanism, the team succeeded in producingabundant hydrogen gas.

Next, the Argonne researchers will try lessexpensive metals for the nanoparticles to lowerthe manufacturing cost, thereby potentially creat-ing a system cheap enough to produce hydrogenfrom water and sunlight on an industrial scale. p

Algae creates hydrogen fuelBy R. Colin Johnson

ENERGY

Argonne chemist Lisa Utschig tests acontainer of photosynthetic proteinslinked with platinum nanoparticles,which can produce hydrogen from

sunlight. Tiny hydrogen bubbles arevisible in the container at right.

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Call 1-877-233-0624 or visit uhctogether.com/acec2 for more information.The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), the ACEC Life/Health Insurance Trust and Unitedhealthcare Insurance Company are three separate legal operating entities and, as such, the organizations are governed and function independently. UnitedHealthcare’s services are provided with the authorization of the ACEC Life/Health Trust. Questions related to health benefits offered through the Life/Health Trust should be directed to 1-800-573-0415.1Network statistic based on GeoAccess information and UnitedHealthcare standard network access mileage criteria, 2010

Here’s why joining ACEC could be the healthiest decision you make all year.

ENGINEERS HAVE EXPRESSED skep-ticism that Hewlett-Packard Co.’s mem-ristors could switch as fast as DRAMand yet retain their memories millionsof times longer than flash. Those skep-tics can now rest easy, according to sen-ior HP fellow Stanley Williams.

“What we have discovered is that anelectric field and a current act togetherto enable a memory device that can bothbe switched very rapidly and hold itsstate indefinitely,” said Williams, thedevice’s inventor. “Not only does anapplied voltage drive the migration of

oxygen vacancies in the device, but atthe same time there is a current thatheats it up to about 300°C—just enoughto turn the amorphous film into a crys-talline film.”

Memristors are touted as the future“universal memory” device becausethey are as fast as DRAM, as small asflash and as durable as read-only-memo-ries, according to HP. As the fourth fun-damental passive circuit element—afterresistors, capacitors and inductors—memristors retain either a high- or low-

resistance state by virtue of introducingor removing oxygen vacancies in oxidethin films.

Utilizing its favorite formulation—titanium oxide—HP recently used high-energy synchrotron X-rays to correlatethe device’s electrical characteristicswith its atomic structure, chemistryand temperature in three dimensions.The unforeseen conclusion was that ahot spot near the bottom electrodeheats enough during switching toinduce a crystallization of the oxide.After driving out vacancies (for a 1) or

introducing them (for a 0) in a 1 -to 2-nanometer-thick region, the film coolsin a process, similar to annealing, thatleaves the film in a fixed crystallinestate; the film should remain in thatstate indefinitely.

“In testing, we have switched thesedevices over 30 billion times and count-ing, with no degradation in their abilityto retain information,” said Williams.

HP is working with Hynix Semicon-ductor Inc. to create commercial memo-ries based on memristive technology. p

HP discovers memristormechanismBy R. Colin Johnson

MEMORY


INTELLIGENCE

Synchrotron X-rays probed the memristor in a 100-nanometer region with concentrated oxygen

vacancies (right, shown in blue) where the memristiveswitching occurs. Surrounding this region, a newly

developed structural phase (red) was also found to actlike a thermometer, revealing how hot the device

becomes when read or written.

SID

Green displays’low power pays offBy Nicolas Mokhoff

LOS ANGELES — Energy efficiency isimproving in flat-panel displays as LEDbacklight architectures are tweaked toenhance performance, speakers report-ed at the Society for Information Dis-play’s recent DisplayWeek event here.

“LED efficiency continues to improvearound 10 to 15 percent per yearthrough improving internal quantumefficiency and increasing light extrac-tion efficiency,” said Ross Young, seniorvice president for displays, LEDs andlighting at IMS Research.

At the Green Technologies confer-ence, held here in conjunction with theSID event, the consensus was that low-er-power displays have an economicadvantage over higher-power displays.

Version 4.0 of the government’s Ener-gy Star compliance specs, introduced inMay 2010, required roughly a 40 per-cent power reduction. Version 4.0 alsorequired TVs to use less than 1 W instandby mode. Energy Star 5.3, slated totake effect in September, will be partic-ularly challenging for large-screen dis-plays; not only are power specs reducedby roughly an additional 30 percent atsmaller sizes, but power requirementswill no longer scale with screen sizebeyond 50 inches, resulting in a 40 per-cent reduction at 55 inches, accordingto Young.

“Plasma TVs will have a real problemmeeting 5.3 over 50 inches,” Young said.“CCFL LCD TVs will also be challengedby Energy Star 5.3.”

Jun Souk, LCD division senior adviserat Samsung, sees optical shutters withMEMS technology providing a short-term efficiency boost. And Liquavista,acquired by Samsung earlier this year, isworking on electrowetting displays,which promise further efficiencyimprovements. p

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TODAY’S MOBILE DEVICES are abouthaving everything in the palm of yourhand, at the touch of a button—fromInternet browsing and e-mail to watch-ing high-definition TV or using a GPS.Increasing demand for multimedia fea-tures translates into complex designrequirements, such as higher perform-ance with reduced power in an ever-smaller footprint.

Design teams have two choices:either shrink the node or innovatesome alternative to address the “more

than Moore” trend. With developmentcosts heading toward $100 million forthe 32-nanometer process node, forexample, monolithic mixed-signal SoCsare increasingly challenging and time-consuming to develop.

Design teams are looking for alterna-tives to speed time-to-market and reducecosts, and some are finding that using 3-D ICs with through-silicon vias (TSVs)represents the most practical way—orperhaps the only way—to handle designcomplexity and maximize performance

and speed. 3-D ICs promise to meet mar-ket demand for miniaturization, higherspeed and greater bandwidth, as well aslower latency and power consumption.That makes the move from 2-D to 3-D a natural choice.

The question today is not whether 3-D ICs will be designed and built, butwhether design teams (outside of ahandful of large semiconductor compa-nies) will have the EDA tools and infra-structure support required to make3-D-ICs cost-effective.

Not a new conceptDespite the recent buzz in the industryabout 3-D technology, the concept is notnew. Indeed, 3-D packaging has beenaround for years, in the form of stacks ofdice with wirebonds, package-in-package(PiP) design and package-on-package

DESIGN PRODUCTS+

3-D IC design: New possibilitiesfor the wireless marketBy Samta Bansal, Brad Griffin and Marc Greenberg

GLOBAL FEATURE


Source: Cadence Design Systems

There have been, and will be, multiple steps along the path to true 3-D IC packaging with stacked dice and through-silicon vias.

(PoP) design, to name a few. PoP is a wide-spread configuration that combines astack of memory modules atop an appli-cation processor or digital baseband.Open up your Apple iPhone 3 or youriPad, and PoP technology is already there.

Other 3-D packaging solutions—suchas embedded dice in laminate, or rebuiltwaferlike fanout wafer-level packag-ing—improve signal integrity, shorteninterconnects and reduce line/space forrerouting, thus shrinking the packagefootprint. Though all of the above con-figurations are 3-D at the packaging lev-el, none of them use TSVs.

Think of a TSV as an additional layerthat helps extend the 3-D packaging tothe IC level. With their short intercon-nects and better electrical performance,TSVs could have a huge impact on totalsystem performance and power. TSVscan be inserted at the bond pad level (vialast-in wafer-level packaging) or at theglobal interconnect level (either via mid-dle back-end-of-line or via first front-end-of-line) by foundries.

For a global interconnect TSV, diestacks are connected not only at the bondpad level, but also at the IP block ormemory bank level. This type of TSVenables true heterogeneous integrationof die stacks using the third dimension inaddition to the x-y direction, allowingoptimized interconnections and betterelectrical performance. Dice intercon-nected using this type of TSV are closer toSoC/IC than system-in package (SiP) and,hence, are better referenced as 3-D ICs.

TSV technology is actually a conver-gence of silicon and packaging with thedesign, making it possible to conceiveand design new architectures. To bene-fit fully from 3-D IC TSVs and make thistechnology cost-effective, a different 3-D architecture needs to be evaluatedat a very early stage.

TSVs have an unclear technologyroad map, however, and methodologyconvergence is lacking because of a gapbetween the TSV technology processand TSV system design. Thus, 3-D ICTSVs represent a new paradigm, forwhich designers must modify theirthinking and look beyond the 2-D con-straints of classical Moore’s Law design.

Target markets Major applications that would use 3-DICs with TSVs are those that require

speed, bandwidth and power optimiza-tion. CPUs, GPUs and routers wouldadopt this technology for speed andbandwidth gains. Performance gainswill lead to more competitive end prod-ucts for which companies can ask high-er prices, and those premiums mightoffset the additional cost that early 3-Dconfigurations will demand.

Graphics designs that demand verywide buses and multicore designs thatrequire high bandwidth to the memorywill also be early adopters of 3-D technol-ogy, even at the higher initial unit cost.

Set-top boxes, DVRs and HDTVs areother promising applications for 3-D ICtechnology. They constitute a cost-sensi-tive segment, but in exchange they offerhigh volume.

The real drive behind 3-D volumeproduction will come from the mobilemarket, especially smartphones. Withmore than 5 billion mobile phonesworldwide, this market representsattractive volumes, but cost will be thedominant criterion for TSV acceptancein the smartphone segment.

Industry requirementsWith the advent of truly mobile com-puting, the mobile industry is searchingfor memory technology that can bringdesktop-like computing performance tomobile devices, including support for 3-D gaming and home-theater standard1080p, 60-frame/second video. Severalestimates forecast that by 2013, SoCdesign starts for mobile devices willneed in excess of 10 Gbytes/s of memorybandwidth—roughly what desktopmachines shipping with DDR3 technol-ogy require today.

While the mobile industry requiresmemory technology that can supportaggressive power and performance goalsin the smallest possible footprint, itmust also shoot for cost-effectiveness.Using 3-D ICs with TSVs is one of severalpossibilities. DRAM stacked with logicusing TSVs—a configuration known aswide I/O—promises 2x to 4x the per-formance of LPDDR2 technology at halfthe power per bit.

Wide I/O could be the technologythat meets the power and performancegoals of the most advanced mobiledevices, if it can be made cost-effective.The mobile industry needs to look intoa number of elements to resolve the

technical and business challenges thatthis technology brings to the table.

One of the biggest questions for anynew memory technology is whetherthere is an industry structure to supportit. Jedec efforts are under way to stan-dardize wide-I/O DRAMs in the areas ofperformance, protocol, number ofbanks and channels, and number andarrangement of TSVs. Such standardiza-tion will create a viable market inwhich DRAM manufacturers can selltheir standard dice to multiple cus-tomers. For their part, customers willhave multiple compatible devices fromwhich to choose.

Another concern regarding TSVs’application with memory, in particular,is that DRAM performs poorly at junc-tion temperatures above 85° C. Keepingthe memory contents refreshed at high-er temperatures requires more current,which itself leads to more heating ofthe die. There are limits to what can bestandardized, and many of the issuesaround assembly, test, and heat dissipa-tion from the 3-D IC stack will need tobe addressed by each customer.

One way of managing the unknownsand risks with 3-D IC technology is theuse of silicon interposers. Passive sili-con interposers allow semiconductorcompanies to gain the performanceassociated with 3-D IC, while mitigatingrisk by avoiding putting TSVs throughactive silicon. The silicon interposeracts as a substrate on which an activedie can be connected with silicon-sizedgeometries that are much smaller thanthe interconnect on a package or pcboard. TSVs are then used through thesilicon interposer to connect to thepackage substrate below.

One of the most public announce-ments on the use of silicon interposerscame from a large FPGA company.Rather than use one large die, the com-pany chose to segment the technologyinto four separate, smaller dice toachieve greater yield. With up to 10,000interconnect channels on each die andless than 1-ns delay, the configurationcould enable performance in the siliconinterposer case to be much greater thanwould be possible if the dice were con-nected side by side on a package sub-strate, or stacked and connected withbonding wire down to the package sub-strate. This silicon interposer approach


DESIGN PRODUCTS+

promises next-generation design densi-ty using current-generation technology.

As appealing as the silicon interposermay be, it’s really just an intermediatestep toward true 3-D ICs. Ultimately,miniaturization and performance goalswill drive design teams to use a stacked,rather than side-by-side, approach.With TSVs, interconnect delay throughthe stacked active silicon should bemuch less than with the side-by-sideinterposer approach. So while the pas-sive silicon interposer is useful forintroducing the concept of TSVs to theindustry, it will most likely lose groundto a stacked TSV approach as the costand attendant risk decrease and asdemand for smaller packages and high-er performance increases.

Assembly continues to be a majorconcern in the industry. Many of theprocessing steps involved in the cre-ation of TSVs can create mechanical,thermal or electrical stresses on the diebeing processed for TSV, and thosestresses may change the properties ofthe device. Manufacturing test is anoth-er issue. For example, finding a methodto probe TSVs with a diameter of 10 μm

each and on a 50-μm grid could proveproblematic. Allowing the probe headto contact more than 2,000 TSVs at atime without damage is another exam-ple. As the industry works to resolvethese issues, we will surely see logicdevices with TSV-connected DRAM inthe next few years.

Despite the lingering challenges andunanswered questions, quite a few bravesouls have embarked on this path and areworking to realize the promise of 3-D-ICsfor improved performance and powermanagement in smaller footprints.

Although there’s been significanttraction in this breakthrough technolo-gy over the past two years, andalthough there are no major showstop-pers from a design or process point ofview, hurdles remain to be clearedalong the path to wide adoption. Thosechallenges include cost, the shift in thedesign method paradigm, system co-design, and the incorporation of newtools and new architectures. A well-defined ecosystem including foundries,IP providers, EDA vendors, and out-sourced semiconductor assembly and

test vendors must emerge with designkits and reference flows. Cost-effective,adoptable technological evolution andecosystem collaboration are essentialfor bringing 3-D ICs with TSVs into themainstream. p

Samta Bansal is senior productmanager for applied siliconrealization at Cadence DesignSystems Inc. She has a

master’s degree in physics and a bachelor’sdegree in electrical and electronics engineering from India’s Birla Institute ofTechnology and Science, Pilani, as well asan MBA from Santa Clara University.

Brad Griffin is director of product management for SiP, IC packaging and PCB high-speed solutions, for Cadence

Design Systems’ Allegro and SiP solutions.He is a graduate of Arizona State University.

Marc Greenberg is director of product marketing for theDRAM Design IP products at Cadence. He has a

master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.


DESIGN PRODUCTS+

Creating stereoscopic 3-D for mobile devicesBy Veera Manikandan Raju

GLOBAL FEATURE

STEREOSCOPIC 3-D is quickly emerg-ing as a prime technology across vari-ous markets, adding a furtherdimension of reality to existing 2-Dvideos, games, movies and images. With3-D TVs having hit store shelves, con-sumers now are getting acquaintedwith large-screen, realistic S3-D effectsin home entertainment. Today, S3-Dexperiences are migrating from thelarge screen to mobile devices, provid-ing realistic—and glasses-free—person-alized viewing experiences on the go.

Overall, S3-D video and imaging usecases can be categorized in two ways:S3-D content creation and S3-D viewing.Each poses a unique set of challenges in

mobile design and development. Thisarticle offers solutions to some of thechallenges and shares perspectives onhow to enable successful S3-D experi-ences on mobile platforms.

It’s important first to understandhow S3-D experiences are created. S3-D essentially adds an extra dimen-sion to a viewing scene using left- andright-image pairs via two cameras. Ingames, for example, S3-D renderingrefers to the positioning of virtual cam-eras, while for S3-D video and images,content is created using two sensorsthat are physically spaced apart.

The human brain is able to differenti-ate depth perception when both views

(left and right, seen through the eyes)are rendered together. Farther objects ina given scene are seen at a distance,while closer objects are seen as closer inproximity to the viewer.

With the correct level of depthadjustments, pairs of stereo images pro-vide the most realistic and natural userexperience. Farther objects are givenpositive disparity, and nearer objects aregiven negative disparity. Accuratelyproviding such disparity requires a ref-erence object on which to focus; this iscalled a convergence plane.

In addition, human eyes see a field ofview (FOV) that is dynamically variablebased on where the eyes are looking,

yielding a very flexible S3-D viewing experience at will(Figure 1).

Content creationIn order to produce such an S3-D effect, content creationneeds to be done with two different camera sensors, and theleft- and right-image pair needs to be processed at 60 frames/

second (left and right at 30 frames/s independently). Stereo camera pairs can be positioned in one of two

ways when creating S3-D images—either in a towingangle or in a flat angle—to achieve the correct FOV.Based on the sensor characteristics, resolution andfocal length, a designer will be able to decide on thebest recording distance between the stereo pair. Posi-tioning of the stereo pair is extremely crucial for get-ting the right convergence plane. The stereo pair canbe positioned at a distance of 65 mm (like humaneyes) to yield a large recording distance. In designinga smartphone or other device with similar size attrib-utes, the designer can consider keeping the position-ing at a distance of 35 mm, to achieve a personalizedrecording distance (1-meter to 3-meter range).

Such camera pairs, when placed on the gadgets, donot necessarily align mechanically perfectly in transla-tional and rotational directions (Figures 2 and 3).There can be minor misalignment in the millimeterswhile placing the sensor modules on the form factordevice. Such minor variations in physical placementsin translational and rotational directions can createlarge misalignment variations in the image plane. Thisimposes a huge challenge in terms of calibrating themisalignments up front and correcting the misalign-ment on a per-frame basis while the content is created.Furthermore, a device’s mechanical aspects—eventemperature variations and the occasional falling ofthe gadget—can create such misalignment betweenthe stereo pair of sensors. It therefore becomes vital tocorrect such variations in real-time.

Once content is created, it is important to ensure itis viewable on the target devices. System softwarerunning in the gadget should be capable of doing thefollowing to provide successful S3-D content viewingexperiences:

• Combine the stereo image pair and process usingthe image signal processing (ISP) unit for the cor-rect resolution, distortion corrections, imagequality tuning and more.

• Decide the convergence plane at run-time usingefficient algorithms, and create disparity vectorsfor the stereo pair at run-time to provide pleasingviewer experiences.

• Correct for the misalignments in translationaland rotational directions at run-time between thestereo image pair, and apply the corrections off-sets per frame.

• Synchronize the 3A (auto-exposure, auto-whitebalance, autofocus) between the sensor modules,and fine-tune the image tuning parameters.

These operations require very sophisticated hardwareaccelerators that can run and process the stereo pair of high-resolution images. Such accelerators are fundamental to next-generation application processors.

Through convergence and misalignment corrections,processed image pairs are passed to the video accelerators of


DESIGN PRODUCTS+

Figure 1

the application processors to encode data in 3-D formats.Today’s H.264 codec offers an extension to process the S3-Dinformation using supplementary enhancement information(SEI), which describes the format and layout of the encodedS3-D scene.

Emerging standards such as Multi-View Codec (MVC) letdesigners encode more than two views for true S3-D effectsusing multiple views. MVC codecs correlate the left- andright-view pair for spatial predictions and motion estima-tions for effective bit rate savings while encoding. Utilizingthe information between the left and right pair for effectivebandwidth reduction can improve the system data usage dur-ing an S3-D video conference, for example, since users in suchinstances are limited by network bandwidth.

Video encoders and decoders have S3-D awareness based onthe content layout. The left and right images can be formattedin multiple ways (side by side, top/bottom, interleaved [col-umn/row] and more). Based on the formatted layout gathered,information is decoded and provided back to the display’s sub-system for rendering the data in stereoscopic fashion.

Generating S3-D experiencesStereoscopic viewing experiences can be generated in multi-ple forms. Two of the most popular ways to view S3-D arethrough LCD shutter glasses and on autostereoscopic LCDpanels. Shutter glasses achieve S3-D experiences by rendering50 percent of the rendered pictures for the left eye and theother 50 percent for the right eye. A technique called time-sequential multiplexing then alternately displays the left-and right-eye images every time the computer refreshes(draws) the screen.

Turning the shutters on the left and right lenses of theglasses using the sync signals generated from the TV createsan S3-D effect for users. It is important to realize that syn-chronizations need to happen very fast (faster than can beperceived) to ensure that a user thinks he or she is seeing trueS3-D. That requires immense processing power on the part ofthe display subsystem of application processors, especiallywhen dealing with high-definition video.

For glasses-free 3-D, autostereoscopic LCD panels displaymultiple views on the LCD panel. Examples of autostereo-scopic displays include parallax barrier, lenticular and time-sequential LCD panels.

The parallax barrier, placed in front of the LCD, consistsof a layer of material with a series of precision slits, allow-ing each eye to see a different set of pixels and thereby creat-ing a sense of depth through parallax. The viewing angle ofa parallax barrier LCD is limited, and the resolution of thepixel count is reduced by half in the horizontal direction;half the pixel count is seen by the left eye and half by the

right eye. Lenticular displays use two-dimensional arrays of lenslets

designed so that when the arrays are viewed from slightly dif-ferent angles, an S3-D effect is created. Time-sequential LCDpanels use an S3-D film (creating an angular view of lightflow through the film) in front of the LCD, controlling thebacklights placed on either side of the LCD at a 120-Hzrefresh rate to create a 3-D viewing experience for the users.Unlike parallax barrier LCD panels, 3-D film-based time-sequential panels produce a full-resolution S3-D experience.

Autostereoscopic panels are becoming popular in mobiledevices. The panels need extensive display processing capabil-ities at the pixel level to format and create an S3-D viewingexperiences in real-time. The display processing has to beeffective at column/row/pixel interleaving for HD-resolutionstereo pairs at 60 frames/s.

S3-D viewing quality poses many challenges, and it varieswith respect to the size of the LCD screen and the angle atwhich the user is viewing the content. It is important for thecreated S3-D content to address convergence issues and mis-alignment corrections, and to enable the appropriate level ofdisparity in the video. If this is not done effectively, the view-ing experiences can irritate human eyes.

Research continues with respect to disparity corrections,depth grading and scene ramping (changing disparity basedon the scene pattern changes) to provide positive viewingexperiences.

The computational power needed to run such content-cre-ation algorithms and pixel-level display processing subsys-tems requires that application processors emerge to meet theneeds of S3-D HD systems. Devices with immense processingpower inside can provide pleasing and natural viewing expe-riences to users, adding the dimension for which S3-D will beknown.

Keep an eye out this year for S3-D-enabled mobile devices. p

Veera Manikandan Raju is engineering manager forTexas Instruments’ Natural User Interface group, whichis part TI’s Wireless business unit. He studied at theRegional Engineering School of Trichirappalli, India.


DESIGN PRODUCTS+

Figure 3

Figure 2

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The approximate number of people on earth.

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We are here to help you get what you need when you need it.

Call 1.800.433.5700 to experience Allied’s first-class service.

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Electronic Engineering Times June 6, 2011 37

DESIGN PRODUCTS+

A FEW YEARS AGO, when I wassearching for a new phone, I dearlywanted a Wi-Fi-enabled model. Butnone of the cell-phone vendors in myvicinity carried one in stock. In fact, anumber of them responded to myinquiries with blank looks, as if I’d beenspeaking a foreign language.

Fast forward to today’s wireless cli-mate, where the passage of a few yearshas yielded some serious technicalinnovation.

In light of Qualcomm’s recent pur-chase of Atheros Communications,UBM TechInsights decided to reviewthe product offerings of both Atherosand Qualcomm to assess the impacton the handset market, including sili-con vendors, in our research for ourstudy on the WPAN market landscape

(http://tiny.cc/iy6lp).Atheros is known for its wireless

LAN (Wi-Fi) products, from which itderives close to 80 percent of its rev-enue. Over the past six years, however,the company has been steadily trying todiversify its offerings with five acquisi-tions. It now offers Bluetooth, GPS, Eth-ernet, powerline networking andpassive optical network solutions.

The study undertaken by UBMTechInsights looked at 220 handsetswith integrated Qualcomm basebandsover a 10-year period. The study alsogauged the technology’s adoption rateas a measure of total systems vs. sys-tems with Bluetooth and/or Wi-Fi.

Bluetooth, which began to be de-ployed starting in 2003, had achieved a100 percent adoption rate in handsets

by 2010.During this same period, Wi-Fi

deployment significantly lagged thatfor Bluetooth, as it had to wait for themarket, as well as the technology, toconverge. From 2008, however, Wi-Fideployment began to experience explo-sive growth, and by 2010 the technolo-gy had a 92 percent adoption rate. Thatconclusion came from a sample set for2010 that consisted of 26 phones.

Also interesting in terms of the studywas the adoption rate for combinationchips. (A combo chip is a multifunctionchip or integrated package [multichipmodule, or MCM] with Bluetooth andWi-Fi; in many cases, combo chipsinclude FM support as well.) Some com-panies, such as Murata, are now creat-ing combo MCMs that have a verysmall footprints. A select number of sili-con providers, such as Broadcom and

Mfr. unknownGPS LNA?

Memsic#MMC314xMS3-axis compassDie #4.1 – Memsic, compass processorDie #4.2 – Memsic, magnetic sensor (qty 3)

Bosch Sensortec#BMA1503-axis MEMS accelerometerDie #8.1 – Bosch, signal processorDie #8.2 – Bosch, MEMS sensor

Atheros#AR6003Single-chip Wi-Fi

Fairchild Semiconductor#FSA9280AUMXUSB multimedia switch

Murata#XM2400SNSP3T switch

Broadcom#BCM2078Bluetooth + FM radio

Wide Bluetooth, Wi-Fi adoptionseen in handsetsBy Gordon Holstead

UNDER THE HOOD

Gordon Holstead ([email protected])is senior analyst at UBMTechInsights.

Texas Instruments, have created single-chip Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/FM solutions, andthe module manufacturers are takingadvantage of that availability.

The trend toward adoption of the single-chip silicon solution was at 62percent in 2010, compared with 69 per-cent for the combo module (MCM).There is an upward trend toward inte-gration of connectivity functionalitysuch as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and FM; todaymost combination products are single-chip silicon solutions.

An example of a popular and simpli-fied solution from a module manufactur-er, such as Murata or Samsung, containsa single die with an additional set of dis-crete components, such as the Samsungmodule found in the Samsung GalaxySpica. This handset uses the BroadcomBCM4325, a single-pole/double-throw(SPDT) switch and various discretes. Themodule measures 8.25 x 7.75 mm.

Less common in modules are multi-die, multifunction solutions, like the onefound in the Sony Ericsson X2. In thiscase, the module maker, Murata, has inte-grated an Atheros AR6002 (Wi-Fi) chipand a single-die Qualcomm Bluetoothwith two switches and other compo-nents. The package size is 9.70 x 9.17 mm.

Some companies are still choosing topopulate the main circuit board withmultidie and discrete components, as canbe seen in the Samsung GT-I5503 Galaxy5, which uses the Atheros AR6003 (forWi-Fi) together with a BroadcomBCM2078 (Bluetooth/FM) chip.

With adoption rates of more than 60percent for single-die multifunction(Bluetooth/Wi-Fi) solutions—many ofwhich are offered by companies likeAtheros, Broadcom and Marvell—itseems Qualcomm had better move fastto expand its product family to includesingle-package (that is, MCM) wirelessconnectivity solutions. It could be a fewyears however, before we see a single-package solution from Qualcomm, evenwith its acquisition of Atheros.

Broadcom and Texas Instrumentscurrently command the bulk of designwins in the combo Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/FMmarket, as we’ve seen in numerous tear-downs conducted over the past year onnumerous handsets and tablets. On theintegration front, Texas Instrumentsreleased a quad-radio (Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/FM/GPS) single-die solution, theWL1283, which was the combo chip ofchoice for the RIM BlackBerry Play-Book. A product announcement fromBroadcom on a quad-radio single-diesolution is still forthcoming; but withTexas Instruments having successfullydesigned a solution, the opportunity forsignificant market share and a chanceto displace Broadcom as the leader inthe connectivity market are now in thatcompany’s control.

Even so, Qualcomm remains wellpositioned to capture a portion of theconnectivity market, if it can provide a cost-effective integrated solution thatleverages its new partnership withAtheros. p


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YOU WENT THROUGH a process to select an opera-tional amplifier (op amp) for your circuit based onthe parameters most critical to your application.Some of the parameters you reviewed may haveincluded supply voltage, gain bandwidth product,slew rate and input noise voltage, to name a few.

You also accounted for input common-mode range,a key parameter for all op-amp applications in yourcircuit, right? If your answer is no, you should contin-ue reading this article. Even if your answer is yes, youmay still find this material useful.

Engineers who have worked with op ampsthroughout their careers have likely experienced sit-uations where an op amp was behaving in an unex-pected manner. The nice thing about op amps is thatthe output often tells the story. In many cases, ifsomething is not “quite right,” it shows up in an obvi-ous way at the output pin. Undesirable output wave-forms can be caused by limitations at the outputstage. Perhaps an oscillation is observed that iscaused by too much capacitance on the output. Ormaybe clipping occurs before reaching the full railvoltage because the output stage is limited to voltageswings less than the supply-rail voltage.

It is also possible for strange behavior to appear atthe op amp’s output that has nothing to do with theoutput stage. Sometimes the undesirable output sig-nal may result from something wrong at the inputside of the device. One of the most common issuesexperienced with op amps is violation of the device’sinput common-mode range. But what exactly is inputcommon-mode range, and what is the impact of vio-lating or exceeding it?

Defining input common-mode rangeWhen speaking of op-amp inputs, input common-mode volt-age (VICM) is one of the first terms of which an engineer thinks,but may lead to some initial confusion. VICM describes a partic-ular voltage level and is defined as the average voltage at theinverting and non-inverting input pins (Figure 1). It is com-monly expressed as: VICM = [VIN (+)+VIN (–)]/2.

Another way to think of VICM is that it is the voltage levelcommon to both non-inverting and inverting inputs, VIN (+)and VIN (–). As it turns out, in most applications VIN (+) isvery close to VIN (–) because closed-loop negative feedbackcauses one input pin to closely track the other such that thedifference between VIN (+) and VIN (–) is close to zero.

This is true for many common circuits, including voltagefollowers, inverting and non-inverting configurations. Inthese cases it is commonly assumed that VIN (+) = VIN (–) =VICM, since these voltages are approximately the same.

Another term used to describe op-amp inputs is input com-mon-mode range (VICMR), or more correctly input common-modevoltage range. This is the parameter most often used indatasheets and also the one where circuit designers should bemost concerned. VICMR defines a range of common-mode inputvoltages that results in proper operation of the op-amp device,and describes how close the inputs can get to either supply rail.

Another way to think of VICMR is that it describes a rangedefined by VICMR_MIN and VICMR_MAX. As shown in Figure 2,VICMR is described by:

Are you violating your op amp’s inputcommon-mode range?By Todd Toporski

PLANET ANALOG

Figure 1: Input common-mode voltage for an op amp.

Figure 2: Input common-mode voltage range for op amp.


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VICMR = VICMR_MAX – VICMR_MINWhere

VICMR_MIN = limit relative to VCC– supply railVICMR_MAX = limit relative to VCC+ supply rail

When VICMR is exceeded, the normal linear operation of the op amp is not guar-anteed. Therefore, it is critical to ensure that the entire range of the input signal isfully understood and that VICMR is not exceeded.

Another point of confusion may be that VICM and VICMR are not standardizedabbreviations and various datasheets from various IC suppliers often use differentterminology including VCM, VIC, VCMR, etc. Consequently, it is necessary to under-stand that the specification you’re looking for is more than a particular input voltage— it is an input voltage range.

VICMR varies among op ampsThe input stage of an op amp is dictated by design specifications and the type of op-amp process technology used. For example, the input stage of a CMOS op amp is dif-ferent from that of a bipolar op amp, which is different than that of a JFET op amp,etc. While the specific details of op-amp input stages and process technologies arebeyond the scope of this article, it is important to note these differences exist amongvarious op-amp devices.

Table 1 shows several examples of op amps from TI and their VICMR. The Max Sup-ply Range column describes split-supply and single-supply (in parentheses) limita-tions. From the table it is clear that the input range, VICMR, is quite different from opamp to op amp. Depending on the type of device, VICMR may fall within or beyondthe supply rails. Hence, never assume that an op amp can receive a particular inputsignal range until it is verified in the datasheet specifications.

Table 1: VICMR examples for several different types of op amps.

Device Technology Max Supply Range (V) VICMR_MIN VICMR_MAX

TLE2062A JFET input VCC+/– = +/–19 V (38 V) (VCC-) + 3.4 V (VCC+) – 1 V

TLC2272 LinCMOS VCC+/– = +/–8 V (16 V) (VCC-) – 0.3 V (VCC+) - 0.8 V

TL971 BiCMOS VCC+/– = +/–7.5 V (15 V) (VCC-) + 1.15 V (VCC+) – 1.15 V

OPA333 CMOS/R-R input VCC+/– = +/–2.75 V (5.5 V) (VCC-) – 0.1 V (VCC+) + 0.1 V

OPA735 CMOS VCC+/– = +/–6 V (12 V) (VCC-) – 0.1 V (VCC+) – 1.5 V

One special case worth mentioning for wide input ranges is the rail-to-rail input opamp. Although the name implies an op amp whose input can span the entire supply-rail range, not all rail-to-rail input devices cover the entire supply range as manymight assume. It’s true that many rail-to-rail input op amps do span the entire supplyrange (such as the OPA333 in Table 1), but there are others that fall a little short andare misleading in their description. Again, it is critical to review the specified inputrange in the datasheet.

Examples of violating VICMRViolating VICMR is commonly seen in single-supply op-amp applications where thenegative rail is often ground, or 0 V, and the positive rail is some positive voltage suchas 3.3 V, 5 V, or higher voltages. In these applications, the input signal range typicallyis not very wide, and the input signal and VICMR must be well understood to makesure proper op-amp operation results. p

Todd Toporski is a member of Group Technical Staff at Texas Instruments where he special-izes in analog applications.

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Multicore processors target Honeycomb tabletsZiiLabs has announced two new members ofits Zii family of media processors. The ZMS-20 and ZMS-40, which target Android Honey-comb-based tablets, feature either dual (-20)or quad (-40) Cortex-A9 processors and up to96 Stemcell media processing cores.Full story: http://bit.ly/ihxS21www.ziilabs.com

Embedded MPU integrates2x ARM Cortex A9 coresSTMicroelectronics introduced an embed-ded microprocessor with advanced multime-dia capabilities. The latest addition to ST’sdual-core ARM Cortex-A9 microprocessorfamily, the SPEAr1340 targets a range ofsmart connected devices.Full story: http://bit.ly/mdosglwww.st.com

VIA Nano X2 E-Series dual-core processors debut for 64-bit X86 appsVIA Nano X2 E-Series processors combinetwo 64-bit, superscalar VIA Nano cores onone die, offering enhanced multitasking andmultimedia performance on a low-powerbudget. The processors combine a power-efficient dual-core architecture withadvanced performance for 64-bit X86embedded system design. Available in twomodels, running at speeds of 1.2+ GHz and1.6+ GHz, the series comes with a compo-nent longevity guarantee of seven years.Full story: http://bit.ly/jxAPtVwww.via.com.tw

Media processor SoCfor multimedia display productsConexant Systems announced a single-chipmedia processor for multimedia displayproducts, including connected Web devicesand interactive video displays, digital sig-nage, home automation/security and userinterface control. The second-generationCX92755 SoC solution supports advancedfunctionality, including high-definition videoencoding and decoding, video/graphics over-lay, image processing, and integrated audioand power supply control.Full story: http://bit.ly/m3QSVFwww.conexant.com

TI unleashes multicore-capableTMS320C6671 DSPTexas Instruments has taken the wraps offthe newest processor in its TMS320C66xDSP family as well as enhancements to itsTMS320C6670 radio SoC. The single-coreTMS320C6671 is based on TI’s KeyStonemulticore architecture, providing developerswith a migration path to multicore designs.Full story: http://bit.ly/kWogEDwww.ti.com

HD audio DSP combineshigh performance, low powerWolfson Microelectronics has announcedthe WM0010 standalone audio DSP andsound enhancement software suite. Incor-porating a low-power, high-performance Ten-silica HiFi DSP core, the fully programmabledevice is offered as a complete high-defini-tion audio solution for applications such assmartphones, tablet PCs and televisions.Full story: http://bit.ly/lZaVN3www.wolfsonmicro.com

Tensilica extends BaseBand Engine familywith DSP IP core for LTE AdvancedThe ConnX BBE64-128 from Tensilica is adigital signal processor intellectual propertycore for system-on-chip design. It providesmore than 100 gigaMACs of performance in28-nm high-performance process technolo-gy. The core was designed to meet the per-formance requirements for Long-TermEvolution Advanced, which requires at leastfive times more processing power than LTE.Full story: http://bit.ly/iQWfCWwww.tensilica.com

Intel rolls 10-core Xeon processorsIntel Corp. announced the Xeon E7, a newfamily of dual-threaded server processors,including the company’s first 10-core parts.The 32-nm Xeon E7 supports up to 20threads, 2 Tbytes of main memory and 30Mbytes of last-level cache in a 513-mm2 die.Full story: http://bit.ly/hFsHMDwww.intel.com

Calxeda gives peek into ARM server SoCStartup Calxeda has released a few detailsabout its unannounced ARM-based processoraimed at low-power servers. Calxeda’s initial

reference design will be based on a quad-core Cortex A9 SoC that consumes 5 W,including associated DRAM. The chipincludes a fabric that acts as an interconnectto other processors, enabling OEMs to packas many as 120 SoCs in a 2U-sized chassis.Full story: http://bit.ly/fkLNORwww.calxeda.com

TI simplifies multicore DSPsoftware developmentTexas Instruments has released softwareupdates for its multicore digital signalprocessors, including the new TMS320C66xDSP generation. The updates include a newmulticore software development kit (MCS-DK), optimized multicore software libraries,Linux kernel support for the C66x DSP gen-eration and support for the OpenMP appli-cation programming interface. Full story: http://bit.ly/mwZWlawww.ti.com

Xelerated’s HX336 NPU reduces power consumption by 50 percentThe HX336 from Xelerated is a wire-speedsingle-chip network processor withadvanced traffic management and deeppacket buffering for 100GE/OTU4 systems.The HX336 reduces power consumption byapproximately 50 percent compared withcompeting multichip packet processing andtraffic management solutions, according tothe company.Full story: http://bit.ly/e8pUtNwww.xelerated.com

Dual-core processor ready for space applicationsAeroflex Gaisler AB (Gothenburg, Sweden)has developed the GR712RC fault-tolerantprocessor, an implementation of a dual-coreLEON3FT Sparc V8 processor using RadSafetechnology. The fault-tolerant design of theprocessor, in combination with the radia-tion-tolerant technology, provides totalimmunity to radiation effects. The power-optimized GR712RC is fully software-com-patible with previous LEON processors, witha performance increase of up to 100 per-cent at the same clock frequency.Full story: http://bit.ly/jz7hR8www.aeroflex.com


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EE LIFE

Engineering for kindergartenersBy Brian Fuller

POP CULTURE

WHEN I WAS IN KINDERGARTEN, Iliked recess, finger-painting and theoccasional nap on our little floor mats.Oh, and lunch, for sure. Tomorrow’s five-and six-year-olds might be in for some-thing a little more sophisticated: engi-neering projects—that is, if Sen. KirstenGillibrand (D-N.Y.) can sell her colleaguesand the U.S. public on her view of educa-tion reform. The idea is not to stop therebut to start there, driving programs fromgrade school through high school thatencourage more kids to pursue careers inscience and engineering.

“I want to make sure our kids havethe skills they need to get the jobs ofthe future, so they can be inventors, sothey can be entrepreneurs, so they cancreate those jobs,” Gillibrand said.

While part of me thinks this is a greatidea, another part of me thinks kinder-garten is a not necessarily the right start-ing point. I don’t know what is, of course(I’m no educator), but kids at that age arejust being introduced into social situa-tions in schools and startingto develop learning skills.Pushing specialized learn-ing topics (outside of read-ing, writing and ‘rithmetic)on them maybe isn’t theway to go. Then again,expectant mothers strapspecialized speakers ontotheir bellies to channelMozart and TED Talk programming totheir soon-to-be-borns, so why not?

What do you think? What experi-ences have you had (watching or work-ing) with kids at early ages ofdevelopment? Is this a feasible idea?

THE COMMUNITY RESPONDSAs a kid, I had a Gilbert Erector Set; amongother things, it taught which way to turn thebolt and nut. I wanted to build a turntablewith an electric motor, so I assembled a

rotating metal shaft through a supportstructure. I had the notion that an electricmotor worked something like a waterwheel,with the wires laid alongside the shaft sothe moving electricity would propel theshaft as it flowed by. Of course, when I

plugged the stripped wires atthe other end of the cord intothe 220-Vac outlet, there wasan incredible display of sparks.

My point is that kinder-garten is a great place tostart—and the first lessonsshould be cautions and warn-ings on the potential dangers of

scientific research. — zeeglen

There’s the thing, Glen. I had a very similarset when I was about four or five. I discov-ered that the holes in the wall (old Britishround pin sockets) were just the right size toput the axles into, to put wheels and thingson to spin them around—except that onetime I tried this and ended up on the otherside of the room, feeling very sorry formyself. … I reckon it immunized me tomains zaps, as I’ve had some good onesover the years, and I’m still here.

[But] I’d agree with starting them young.My dad got me books, batteries, light bulbsand stuff to play with, then later [broughtme] electronics kits and old pc boards fromthe techies he worked with … I went on toan evening TV/radio/electronics course whileI was still at school.

Kindergarten is maybe a bit early, but pri-mary school would be a good place to intro-duce kids to engineering. — David Ashton

Engineering education starts at least as ear-ly as kindergarten, if not earlier. Stackingblocks and plastic colored doughnuts leadsto Lego sets, and so on.

I too had an erector set as a child, proba-bly a few years after kindergarten; this wascertainly my first experience in using ascrewdriver and learning “lefty loosey, rightytighty,” and in using batteries and electricmotors to make things move.

While I was still in grammar school, myparents gave me an interesting electronicslearning kit—something they probablypicked up on a whim for $20 at a hobbystore—with which I learned to follow thedirections and make Morse Code audiobeeper circuits, an AM crystal radio receiver


EE LIFE

Knee-deepin exploding miceBy Mike Bergman

ENGINEERINGINVESTIGATIONS

I’D BEEN ASKED TO HELP “Joe,” aless experienced coworker, with an ESDproblem, my sage advice having beenappropriately sought because I had awhole five years’ worth of work experi-ence under my belt.

The product was only a computermouse. But we were selling tons ofthem to our best customer—one of thebiggest computer makers in the worldat the time—and the units were mal-functioning in the field.The production line hadalready been down forabout a week when I joinedthe effort, so managementwas—how shall I put it—perturbed.

The mouse had shippedwith little incident formonths during the relative-ly wet spring. But the drier weather ofsummer led to more static events, anddefective mice were coming back fasterthan we could ship out replacements.

The mice passed the basic static zap test, but when we played with the ground method a bit, lo andbehold: They began blowing up in the lab, just as they’d been doing inthe field.

The mouse included an ASICdesigned by our customer, the comput-er maker. “Use this,” the customer hadtold us, implying, if not explicitlyadding, “or else.” So the mouse wasessentially a build-to-print job for ourfactory.

Still, we were responsible for thedesign performance because … well, ourcustomer assured us we were responsi-ble, and Sales agreed.

So there we were, holding daily inter-nal meetings on our progress, mice

exploding right and left, ankle-deep inreturns, with no answers.

The first clue had come quicklyenough: The ASIC, of course, was fail-ing, and we’d found a failed input pin.But the chip had passed the version ofMIL-STD-883 that was in use at thetime, and that test was the gold stan-dard for chip-level ESD robustness. Sothe theory was that our board layoutwas faulty. At least, that was Sales’ the-

ory. (Sales was quite help-ful. Really.)

We (mostly Joe, to behonest) tried all kinds ofthings to reinforce theboard. We knew thatadding filters and caps wasnot dealing with the issueat the source—but the ASIChad passed and repassed the

MIL-STD-883 test, and there was noth-ing obviously wrong with the schemat-ic otherwise.

After the initial panic of the firstweek, another week went by, followedby more weeks, then months. I cannotadequately describe the hell that thishigh-priority, hugely expensive issuebecame. We pretty much knew therewas something wrong with the ASIC’sESD performance, but we had no proof.We were having conference calls on aweekly basis with the ASIC vendor,with no result.

Then, a savior appeared. Our QCmanager, who was qualified by dint ofprevious experience as a dental hygien-ist (don’t ask), hired an outside con-sulting firm to analyze the ASIC. Theseexperts decapped the package and tookhi-res photos through a microscope.

Their images showed tiny craters allover the die, as if the chip had been

and lots of other neat stuff. Taking apart atelephone to see what made it ring—backwhen those were owned by the phone com-pany and not to be tampered with—is anoth-er fond childhood memory; I think I wasgrounded for at least a week for that one.

This was all just fun and games at thetime, long before I realized that people actu-ally made a living messing around with cir-cuits and that this might actually be acareer choice I should consider.

The point is, kids are never too young tostart learning how things work and why.Many of us were learning engineering longbefore we knew what engineering was, orthat we even wanted to know what it was or do it for a living. — Frank Eory

Humans engineer; it’s what we do. Someother animals use tools, but, as far as I candiscover, we are the only critters that actual-ly design and build tools. Trying to keephumans from engineering is like trying tokeep a shark from swimming.

That said, getting students to followcareers in science and engineering isn’t aneducational issue, it’s an employment issue.There was a government study back in ’02or ’03 that actually pointed this out. Obvious-ly, no one has read it, because everyone stillthinks schools need to address the issue.

The reality is that over the past four tofive decades, science and engineering profes-sionals have become less and less respected,our jobs are unstable and our salaries havenot kept up with inflation (by any measure).

Today’s students see this, and they arenot dumb; why go to the effort of getting adegree in a rigorous discipline, when it iseasier to get one in, say, finance, get morerespect and make more money—and theposition is no less stable?

Bring back a culture where engineers arewell respected and well compensated, andwatch students return to these disciplines.

— AlPothoof

As long as the society [undervalues] engi-neers, we will continue to lose “value ofdesign” to other countries that glorify engi-neering, and it does not matter when youstart the education. It is only a matter oftime before we completely transform from a“country of invention” to a “country of con-sumers,” unless we take serious steps now.

— SeanR9

JOIN THE CONVERSATION

http://bit.ly/mhZusl

sandblasted. Their verdict was that theASIC vendor had “a process problem.”

As the consultants explained this, Igot more and more worried. Theirexplanation simply did not ring true. A major ASIC vendor is shipping prod-uct with visible scars on the top insulat-ing layer, and had been doing so formonths? Even after we’d complained ofproblems, the vendor hadn’t found this?And even if the consultant’s expertswere correct, how was the die problemtied to the ESD failures?

Then, the consulting company’s chiefengineer pointed dramatically at a scarnear a large structure, and said, “Youcan see how close this damage is to thatoutput transistor.” Output transistor? Itwas an alignment mark! Anyone whohad worked with a die at this levelshould have immediately recognizedthe marks used to match up the layersin the semiconductor process.

We were wasting our time with theseconsultants. Later I found they’d used acombination of sulfuric acid and waterto prepare the chip, and the brew hadcaused the scarring. (Water on top ofH2S04 is bad.)

I went back and called a friend, whohad access to similar equipment at hisjob. After hours, we decapped thechip—the right way—and looked at itunder his microscope.

Now the problem became obvious.Any CMOS gate tied to an input pinneeds an ESD protection structure. Thefailing input did have such a structure,

but it was on the wrong side of theinput gate. The order should have beenbond pad and ESD structure, then theCMOS input. Instead, they had thebond pad and CMOS input, then theESD structure. Under the amazinglyfast rise times of ESD events, theCMOS input had time to blow beforethe event could trigger the ESD struc-ture downstream. This was the equiva-lent of putting the airbag behind thedriver, so that the driver’s body couldprotect the airbag from the crash.

That afternoon, Joe and I called ourengineering contact at the ASIC vendorto tell him we’d found the problem.His response still makes my knucklesgo white: “Oh. That. We have a fix infab; samples should be ready in twoweeks.” The vendor had known aboutthe problem for five months by thattime. They’d known before we startedproduction. And they known duringevery weekly conference call that hadensued. Excuse me, I have to go hit

something …Anyway, we assembled the evidence

for our customer, who by this time wasfurious about the millions of dollars incosts for the returns. We were able toshow that the ASIC our customer haddesigned was defective because of a mis-take made by its ASIC vendor.

So—of course—we ended up payingfor the recall.

If you’re early in your career, andthis has you shaking your head aboutour profession, don’t sweat. Joe andI have done well in our respectivecareers; in fact he owns his own business.

So solve the problem at hand, andmove on; there will always be anotherone. p

Mike Bergman has worked in different segments of the electronics industry forlonger than he cares to admit. He is with a large CE company now and is involved in digital broadcast technologies.


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LAST WORD

A moon walker and ahistorian have offereddiffering explanations ofhow we’ve reached aseeming impasse inmanned spaceflight asthe space shuttle pro-gram winds down. Thehistorian, John Logsdon,argues in a new book,John Kennedy and the Raceto the Moon, that theUnited States essentiallyengaged in a “tail chase”to the moon during the1960s because the SovietUnion had neverexpressly declared itsintention to send cosmo-nauts there. Logsdon andothers also doubt theSoviets had the means tomount a manned lunar flight.

But Logsdon’s most surprising con-clusion is that Apollo was fundamental-ly a Cold War program designed to meeta narrow political objective.

The undeniable outcome ofKennedy’s initiative is that the Ameri-can space program has reached a deadend; with the end of the shuttle pro-gram, the nation has no immediatemeans of sending humans beyondEarth orbit. (It’s certain the moon race,if in fact there was one, was over whenApollo 8 orbited the moon on Christ-

mas Eve in 1968.)Logsdon and

astronaut EugeneCernan recentlyreflected on themeaning ofKennedy’s moonspeech in theshadow of therelics of the firstSpace Age, housedat the Smithson-ian Museum’sannex near Dulles International Air-port. Cernan, thecommander of thefinal moon mis-sion and the “lastman to walk onthe moon,”declared again, as

he had on previous space anniversaries,that the U.S. manned spaceflight pro-gram is in “disarray” and that the Oba-ma administration’s space policies putthe nation on “a path to nowhere.”

Cernan is not a man to be trifledwith. He went to the moon twice. Thesecond time, in December 1972, aboardApollo 17, he and geologist HarrisonSchmitt explored the Taurus LittrowValley. “I called the moon my home forthree days of my life,” Cernan said,choking up at the memory.

While Cernan has nothing but praise

for JFK’s vision, he has only scorn forPresident Obama and NASA administra-tor Charles Bolden. But he also under-stands that it was timing and luck, asmuch as technology, that had placedhim and the other moon walkers on“God’s front porch,” from which theyhad gazed back at Earth.

Cernan’s blanket condemnation ofthe trajectory of human exploration ofthe solar system ignores many of thescientific advances made since his Apol-lo flights. Our magnificent machineshave probed the solar system, sendingback invaluable data about its origins.Then there is the remarkable HubbleSpace Telescope and its celestial imagesof the universe.

Researchers today are still analyzingthe “orange glass soil” brought back fromthe moon by Cernan’s Apollo 17 crew.Late last month, just one day after Cer-nan’s talk, NASA announced thatresearchers had measured water in thosesamples, in the form of tiny particles ofmolten rock, for the first time. The “lunarmelt inclusions” indicate the water con-tent of lunar magma is 100 times higherthan previously thought. And wherethere’s water, there’s a chance thathumans could one day survive.

Cernan and Schmitt had stumbledacross the orange soil as they explored alunar valley steeper than the GrandCanyon. Decades later, the sample theybrought home is slowly revealing itssecrets. It’s a reminder that the rewardsof exploration—whether of the oceansand last pristine lands on Earth or ofthe vast reaches beyond—come in fitsand starts.

Most of us would love to see an Apol-lo-like program to send humans toMars. But it would take resources andmoney, and for now those are in shortsupply. And it will take another organ-izing principle, akin to the Cold War-driven Apollo program, to push thefrontiers of science.

On one score, however, I heartilyagree with Cernan: Somewhere there’sa child who has an idea that will oneday take us to the stars.

We only need to discard our petty dif-ferences and think big. p

By George Leopold ([email protected]), news director for EE Times andeditor in chief of EE Times Confidential.

May marked the 50th anniversary of PresidentKennedy’s speech to a joint session of Congressin which he proposed manned missions to themoon. As on previous anniversaries, thenation’s newspapers published op-ed piecesdecrying the deterioration of the Americanmanned space program since the end of theApollo era.

Space exploration is amarathon, not a sprint

The rewards of explorationcome in fits and starts

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