Toshiba has been outlining its new strategy to halt the decline in the traditional ASIC market by offering a foundry service that incorporates some features of ASIC design. In recent years ASICs have gradually been giving way to applications-specific standard products (ASSP), mainly because the high tooling costs for ASICs are prohibitive for fabless vendors and start-ups, and these costs will increase further as geometries move from 65nm through 40nm and then to 28nm, which will commence in 2010. In a presentation at last month's GSA and IET International Semiconductor Forum, Toshiba's technology executive Tatsuo Noguchi described the principle of 'hybrid ASICs' for mixed-signal applications such as wireless, and Eugen Pfumfel, their ASIC and foundry business development manager, elaborated on this when I spoke with him at Wireless 2.0 last week.
The hybrid ASIC, or 'ASIC & foundry' model allows the customer to combine their own IP − such as RF building blocks − with standard IP from the Toshiba library and cores such as ARM, and also to have the freedom to decide where the interface between the two should occur. One of the big benefits of this technology for wireless and RF in particular is that it allows a holistic design approach that takes the package parasitics into account from the beginning of the design process. Toshiba calls this Chip Package System (CPS).
It was announced in April that Ubidyne had employed a hybrid design flow using Toshiba's TC300 90nm technology in the development of its D2.0 system on chip (SoC) digital up/down converter for wireless infrastructure. The programme combined ASIC and COT (customer-owned tooling) methodologies to enable Ubidyne to concentrate on system design and the development of its own custom designed, high-speed, digital IP blocks while relying on Toshiba's ASIC expertise for the other parts of the chip. Switching frequencies of up to 4GHz are supported in the digital portion of the device. Ubidyne's antenna embedded radio system offers a high level of integration and radio performance by embedding directly into the antenna housing, eliminating the need for remote electrical tilt motors, large power amplifiers and coaxial feeders, and the technology enables a completely digital distributed architecture – a design that gives mobile infrastructure equipment vendors maximum performance, flexibility and coverage.
Toshiba predicts that ASIC & foundry will exceed 40% of its System LSI business by the end of 2009, while System LSI itself accounts for 40% of Toshiba's total semiconductor business.
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