ANAHEIM, Calif. — One phrase defines Intel's Justin Rattner: "Think, but rethink".

The Intel senior fellow, corporate vice president and director of Intel's Corporate Technology Group, also serves as chief technology officer. Rattner is responsible for leading Intel's microprocessor, communications and systems technology labs as well as Intel Research.

At the Design Automation Conference (DAC) here, Rattner said, "If there is one thing I would like to leave you with, it is to rethink analog processing as a computational problem, rather than as an 'analog' problem."

Rattner was referring to the increasing challenge system-on-chip designers face as the analog portion of a chip design is integrated onto ever-shrinking silicon in mobile devices. "Analog is how we interact with the real world, but the technology favors digital," said Rattner.

Rattner discussed Intel's "Carry Small, Live Large" research program, in which mobile devices link to the "real world" automatically via radio. "These scenarios are driving the integration of SoCs," said Rattner.

The goal is a single, integrated multiradio SoC in a mobile device that allows the device to handles calls or data transfers when moving from indoors to outside without shutting down and restarting a mobile device.

Rattner used the evolution of photography as an example. "Except for the light from the complex lens creating a digital image, nothing much has changed in the camera since film has gone away. Now if you replace the lens apparatus with a computational 'light field', then you can use software to choose which image among many possible light field images you want to capture.

"The problem moves to the computational domain and the focus and depth of field can be adjusted at will at the time of image capture," added Rattner. The camera and lens can then be simplified, a good thing since today's mechanical lenses are at the limit of their optical performance.

If radio design is considered as a "computational problem," this would allow one radio to act as many. Rattner said this would dramatically simplify radio architectures by utilizing fewer transistors to implement many radio modulation schemes.

Rattner said his scheme is more in line with DAC's "Wild and Crazy Ideas" initiative. To illustrate, he showed simplified receiver and transmitter diagrams for such a radio and claimed that Intel has successfully designed three main circuits for a "computational solution."

"At this year's International Solid State Circuits Conference, we detailed a 65-nanometer CMOS digital low-noise amplifier, a 90-nanometer synthesizer and a spectrum-sensing sigma delta analog-to-digital converter with the highest figure of merit ever reported," claimed Rattner. The three devices are considered crucial for implementing the integrated, multimode radio.

Rattner said EDA tools for such a radio need a system-level approach that can handle reconfigurable architectures. Researchers at Intel's St. Petersburg, Russia, lab have developed a dataflow design tool to reconfigure baseband processors.

"Our radio engineers found the tool very eloquent in that they found it had a very natural way to express various radio protocols," he said.