SUNNYVALE, Calif. — When it comes to spinning out new intellectual property cores for SoCs, Faraday Technology Corp. is eager to be first out of the gate. But the company doesn't necessarily want to rely on the latest manufacturing technology for the job.
Recently, the company qualified six USB 2.0 cores for 0.18- and 0.25-micron technology provided by foundry partner UMC. The company promises to deliver six more cores using two versions of 0.13-micron process technology, but not until the second half of the year.
The reason, said director of sales Mike Shamshirian, is that smaller die sizes afforded using 0.13-micron design rules still doesn't provide enough of a cost savings to justify the move.
"The cost of the masks and wafers at 0.25 micron is lower," he said. "The die area and cost for 0.25 and 0.18 is not that significant."
This is particularly true for cost-sensitive consumer applications, the primary target for USB chips. "Every half a penny counts," he said.
Faraday's offering includes the physical and digital control portions of the USB 2.0 specification and are available now on both 0.18- and 0.25-micron technology.
Based essentially the same design for both process technology, the transceiver portion can run at USB's highest data rate of 480-Mbits per second or lower, including USB 1.1 speeds. It consumes 75 milliamps when active and less than 200 microamps in suspend mode. Faraday is now tweaking the design to lower the power consumption even further in coming weeks, Shamshirian said.
The company also plans to introduce a version of the IP cores that conforms to the USB on-the-go specification, a subset of USB 2.0 that allows peripherals to work as both a host and a slave without the aid of a PC host processor. The 0.25-micron version will be ready this quarter while the 0.18-micron core should be available in the third quarter, according to the company.
The USB 2.0 cores are intended for system and chip companies designing ASICs that will go into scores of consumer applications, such as flash-card readers, digital cameras, printers and PDAs. Other targets include DSL modems, wireless LANs and other storage and networking interfaces.
Shamshirian expects most applications will try to integrate USB 2.0 transceiver and controller logic on the same chip as a way to reduce design and test time. "The cost of the IP components will be lower when customers buy both," he said.
