News & Analysis
Five More Tough DesignCon Questions
Rick Merritt
1/4/2013 3:15 PM EST
What happens when high speed meets low power design?
Times are changing. The cloudy stories will be big at DesignCon for years, but the handset hassles are starting to invade the event like so many signal integrity weeds. Samsung will present as many as three papers on its work delivering a 28 nm applications processor that cranks up support for low power DDR3 DRAM to 1.6 GHz.
Expect lots of talk about such issues over coffee and beer, and more papers about it next year.
Links to sessions mentioned above:
Samsung on 1.6 GHz LPDDR3 work in 28nm apps processor
Samsung discusses a 533 MHz design
We are clearly in the mobile era. DesignCon historically has its head
wired into the cloud computing skies where 10G servers meet 100G
Ethernet switches these days.
Times are changing. The cloudy stories will be big at DesignCon for years, but the handset hassles are starting to invade the event like so many signal integrity weeds. Samsung will present as many as three papers on its work delivering a 28 nm applications processor that cranks up support for low power DDR3 DRAM to 1.6 GHz.
Expect lots of talk about such issues over coffee and beer, and more papers about it next year.
Links to sessions mentioned above:
Samsung on 1.6 GHz LPDDR3 work in 28nm apps processor
Samsung discusses a 533 MHz design
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rick.merritt
1/4/2013 5:01 PM EST
What questions do you have about high speed design?
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MaggieC
1/15/2013 6:17 PM EST
I noticed your comments about materials so here are some thoughts: the industry is moving beyond just using conventional FR4. Most of the
change is geared toward the raw materials, like resin, glass fabrics and
copper, as well as a focus on hybrid constructions that utilize multiple
types of laminates in the same PCB. Spread glass is becoming popular again because of its more consistent rates of the signal speeds. We are also looking at material combinations that may function differently. Some layers of an interconnect may require high-speed materials, while other parts might only require FR4, or you may have a combination of materials on different layers. Another reason for the move to hybrid constructions is to lower costs, as high-speed laminates can reach 15x the cost of standard materials. Additionally, there is usually much more material used on a higher layer board. Another important change is the
move to lead free-assemblies in order to conform with international
standards for eco-friendly products. Dale Kersten, Vice President Operations, Global Engineering, Sanmina
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