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 What are the biggest challenges today for SoC developers when integrating Data Conversion solutions?
 As we all know, today’s leading edge SoCs are made of hundreds of millions of transistors. Most of these transistors form digital gates that are assembled together to create complex functionality. Complete suites of EDA tools exist to manage the complexity of these digital designs and guarantee correct design closure with a good probability of success.
These SoCs also include analog functions—typically Data Converters—that interface the digital functionality from/into an essentially analog world.
Many of the challenges for SoC developers when integrating Data Conversion solutions are transversal to all analog functions, such as achieving reduced area and cost along with extremely low power dissipation.
Today, there is a constant drive for integration of more complex features onto the same SoC. This increased level of integration, coupled with the use of finer-pitch technology processes, poses many evolving challenges to the SoC developer, who has to integrate these analog IP blocks into his system.
Data Converters, like other high-performance analog functions, explore the limits of what is achievable in modern deep-submicron processes that are developed mainly for digital designs. This has been a challenge for several years. The challenge for SoC developers is to integrate the Data Converter into their system in such a way that its capabilities are fully exploited, and the success of the system is guaranteed.
How can MIPS Technologies help?
Through MIPS Technologies’ relentless focus on the needs of our customers’ specific applications, we are able to provide cutting edge converter technology that is optimized for these applications and features very low power and area characteristics. These IP solutions are created to excel in the difficult environment of an SoC.
I was visiting with a customer the other day who said that it is a great relief to their engineers to have us working closely with his team throughout the complete SoC development cycle, providing a very comprehensive set of tools and expertise to ease the integration of their solutions, and guaranteeing the timely success of that product.
MIPS Technologies’ main focus is on reducing our customers’ effort in integrating Data Converter solutions. By providing silicon-proven solutions, we further mitigate the risk of integration.
What are MIPS Technologies’ Data Conversion solutions?
Let me try to answer this complex question in a simple way! Our Data Conversion solutions are IP hard macros that are created to sit on the “edge” of the digital processing cores. They allow for the interface between the well-known world of digital 0s and 1s and the physical world that basically only “understands” analog quantities.
These converters can be either Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) or Digital-to-Analog Converters (DACs). The converters incorporate the technologies that are best suited to the target application, for example:
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Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADC for low sampling rate, housekeeping applications such as transducer measurements
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Pipeline ADC for high-performance, high sampling rate applications such as communications, multimedia and video
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Over-sampled, delta-sigma ADC for high resolution, narrow band communications and audio
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Very high sampling rate parallel ADC for GHz sampling rate applications
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Current steering DAC for high-performance applications
These advanced converters are at the core of the special purpose Analog Front End (AFE) hard macros that extend their functionality into complete analog/mixed-signal subsystems such as our Touch Screen Controller AFE, Complete Video AFE—including all the analog video processing functionality—and Wireless Broadband Communications AFE for applications such as mWiMAX/Wibro (WMAN), LTE and WiFi (WLAN).
What is your vision for Data Conversion?
At MIPS
Technologies, we understand that Data Converters are a key feature in most applications, and we anticipate that the push to integrate converter IP within digital SoCs will remain strong in the future.
Application requirements will continue to evolve, and our goal is to continue developing the most advanced converter technology and deliver it in the form of IP solutions that are seamlessly integrated onto the SoC. As technology continues to advance, more sophisticated applications that presently do not lend themselves to easy integration will also follow the integration trend and ultimately reduce system costs.
We also see the continued evolution of consumer electronics in generating new and demanding requirements in terms of the required converters, thus expanding the scope of Data Converters up to the multi-GHz range as well as into 12 to 14-bit resolution.
We are committed to continuing to enable this development by providing IP solutions that are suited to new applications that flourish in the marketplace.
Why choose MIPS Technologies’ Data Conversion IP solutions?
There are many compelling reasons for selecting MIPS Technologies’ Data Conversion IP solutions over other IP vendors’ proposals. Here I describe a few of the most important, based on key reasons that many customers have cited throughout the years.
One key reason to select MIPS
Technologies’ solutions is the ability to leverage our mature technology and 10+ years of experience in Data Conversion technology. Our broad portfolio of IP solutions covers all process nodes from 0.18um to 65nm in the major open foundry processes. We are continuously updating our innovative converter IP offerings with more advanced converters in an expanded set of advanced process nodes. We can therefore easily support our customers’ roadmap developments.
Another reason to select MIPS is our proven track record in delivering solutions that are optimized for a wide range of applications—improving our customers’ ability to craft advanced products in an optimal way, without having to compromise architectural efficiencies or performance.
MIPS Technologies’ deep applications knowledge allows us to assist our customers in defining the Data Conversion requirements that are best suited to their application. By engaging with customers at an early stage of SoC development, we can identify trade-offs that will enhance their overall system solution and avoid bottlenecks or costly over-specifications that would increase the risk of success for the final product.
Finally, customers can be confident that our very experienced team is completely focused on their success, and that we will work closely with them throughout the complete SoC design process to ensure a smooth and trouble-free process from SoC integration to production.
What is MIPS’ Data Conversion Roadmap?
MIPS Technologies works closely with customers and also closely tracks market developments, placing us in an excellent position to define solutions that match our customers’ expectations for future application needs.
For example, recent multimedia standards, such as Wireless HD, have led to development of a very advanced converter technology that is able to achieve sampling rates beyond 2.6 GHz while keeping power consumption to a minimum.
We plan to expand our excellent coverage of low-power wireless broadband applications to different nodes and processes, and also provide more converter solutions targeting plugged domain applications, such set-top boxes, which typically favor higher raw performance over reduced power dissipation.
Read more about MIPS
Technologies’ Data Conversion solutions here.
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