This year should provide several interesting tug-of-war contests between competing process technologies. Last month, both IBM Corp.'s Microelectronics Division and STMicroelectronics said they were ready to use silicon germanium process technology to make power amplifiers, challenging the gallium arsenide-based solutions that dominate the mobile phone PA market.
Silicon-on-insulator and bulk CMOS also will go head-to-head, starting late this year, when AMD moves its 0.13-micron SOI-based Hammer processor to production-level quantities, competing with Intel's best stuff on bulk CMOS.
Here in Texas, Silicon Laboratories Inc. (Austin) is about to test two markets with its CMOS-based mixed-signal technology. In the wireless market, Silicon Labs is nearly ready to ship commercial quantities of its GSM RF transceiver, based on CMOS, rather than bipolar, technology. And in the OC-192 optical IC sector, Silicon Labs again is using CMOS to challenge vendors, such as Vitesse, that have used GaAs for transceivers and clocking ICs.
Silicon Labs still has some bugs to wring out of its OC-192 optical products, which are somewhat late to arrive to a still-emerging market. Silicon Labs CEO Nav Sooch, and co-founders Dave Welland and Jeff Scott, are old hands at replacing bipolar circuits with CMOS. While at Crystal Semiconductor (now a part of Cirrus Logic), they developed ground-breaking mixed-signal products in CMOS, including the industry's first CMOS PRML read-channel circuit.
Silicon Labs established itself in the wireless phone market with its synthesizer products, which are used in GSM handsets, 802.11 wireless LAN stations and XM satellite radio modules.
The RF transceiver market is the single biggest market left for bipolar, Sooch said, adding that integrating the voltage control oscillators, loop filter and phase-locked loops was "a daunting task."
Sooch points to earlier mass-market ICs that were converted to CMOS, including Ethernet transceivers in 1992, T1 line interface products in 1986 and telecom codecs in 1980.
Will the billion-dollar RF transceiver market be next in line to move from bipolar-based products to CMOS?
Some markets are accepting more-complex technologies, such as SOI, to gain performance (or to stay with conservative design rules, as Motorola did with its 0.18-micron SOI gigahertz PowerPC). The push to low-cost CMOS, using standard foundry processes, continues to hold promise.
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