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The 14th International System-on-Chip (SoC)

Conference, Exhibit & Workshops

 October 19 & 20, 2016

University of California, Irvine (UCI) - Calit2

13th International SoC Conference In Pictures. . .

         
 
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5th International System-on-Chip (SoC)

Conference, Exhibit & Workshops

November 7 & 8, 2007 Radisson Hotel Newport Beach, Southern California

 

The Most Informative, Targeted, and Affordably Priced

SoC, ASIC, ASSP, FPGA, and Foundry Technology Conference & Exhibit Event of the Year!

 

 

 

Conference Program Abstracts & Bios*

 

       
 

8:00 - 8:15

Savant Company Inc.

Farhad Mafie, President and CEO of Savant Company Inc.

"Welcome and Opening Remarks, Technology/Market Trends."

 

Farhad has over 20 years of experience in semiconductor and computer businesses and more than 10 years of university-level teaching experience.  Farhad is the former Vice President of Marketing/Business Development and Technical Sales Engineering at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. He was responsible for marketing the entire Toshiba standard ICs (RISC/CISC CPUs, Configurable CPUs, DSPs, Bluetooth, Wireless ICs, RFID, MPEG-4, CCD/CMOS, Analog ICs, Automotive ICs, etc.).  He was also responsible for engineering development for Toshiba's Embedded and Digital Consumer products & solutions based on ASSP and SoC Models.

 

Farhad established Toshiba's on-line Tech-Support System as well as Toshiba's on-line System Solution Selling methodologies for all Toshiba's products in the North American markets. These on-line systems were adopted by Toshiba on a worldwide basis.  He also developed Toshiba's ASSP Business Unit and Technical Sales Engineering Team as two brand new organizations for the company.   Farhad has also worked at Lucent Technologies on marketing communications ICs, Toshiba Information Systems on product definition for Toshiba's notebooks and handheld products, Unisys on designing new processors and computer systems, and MSI Data on designing data collection products.  He has a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from California State University, Fullerton.  His combined business and academic experience has given Farhad a unique ability to effectively communicate complex new technologies to business professionals at all levels, as well as the ability to foresee emerging leading-edge technologies.  Farhad is an author and a translator, and he writes articles for a variety of journals and Web-based magazines on technology and political affairs.

     
 

8:15 am - 12:00 am

Semiconductor Technology & Trends:

New Design Approaches for Complex SoCs

Track Chairman: Dr. Goran Matijasevic is Director of Research Development at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine

 
   

Dr. Goran Matijasevic is Director of Research Development at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine

Bio: Goran Matijasevic is Director of Research Development at The Henry Samueli School of Engineering at UC Irvine. In this capacity, he works on formation of new industry-university and academic collaborations, especially focusing on new interdisciplinary research initiatives. Prior to this, he was the Research Coordinator of the Integrated Nanosystems Research Facility at UC Irvine, where he worked closely with industry partners on making them aware of available university resources. Prior to UCI, he worked as a senior engineer at QPlus, a telecommunications start-up company. From 1994 to 2001, he was at Ormet Technologies, where as Director of Research he was working on development of polymer and metal materials and structures for electrical interconnect of high density circuits, new metal alloys for use in conductive adhesives, materials for embedded passive components and heat sensors, and high thermal efficiency electronic substrates. ¨He managed multiple SBIR projects that led to several industry consortia projects, as well as a license agreement with a Fortune 100 company. He has 4 U.S. patents, 3 book chapters, and over 40 conference and journal publications and has served on the NEMI Industry Roadmap committee. He served as NanoWorld Conference Technical Chair, the Electronic Components and Technology Conference (ECTC) Interconnect Chair and Emerging Technologies Chair, the IEEE Sensors 2006 Local Chair, the ASME Frontiers in Biomedical Devices Co-Char, as well as on the LARTA Tech Transfer Conference Organizing Committee. He is currently on the OCTANe (Orange County Technology Action Network) Operations Committee and Vice Chair of OC Innovation. Goran received his PhD from UC Irvine in Electrical and Computer Engineering and his MBA from Pepperdine University. He is also a member of the TriTech Advisory Board, Southern California Biomedical Council Board, Tech Coast Venture Network, IEEE, and ASME.

 
 

8:15 - 8:45

iSuppli

Jordan Selburn, Principal Analyst, Core Silicon, iSuppli Corp

 

Bio: Jordan came to iSuppli with decades of extensive experience in ASIC, programmable logic and semiconductor intellectual property (IP) analysis, product marketing, and engineering development. Prior to joining iSuppli, Jordan served as the Director of Product Marketing for Amphion Semiconductor, where he was tasked with managing the technical product marketing team. He launched products in all of Amphion’s product families in addition to providing in-depth sales support for the products and the IP business model. Prior to his tenure with Amphion, Jordan was the Principal Analyst for ASIC and IP at Gartner Group/Dataquest and as such was responsible for the evaluation and analysis of semiconductor IP as well as the ASIC and programmable logic markets. He formulated and presented tracking and forecasting on technology and market trends with particular emphasis on system-level integration as part of his duties at Gartner Group/Dataquest.  Marketing Manager and Product Line Manager positions at LSI Logic preceded his employment at Gartner Group/Dataquest. At LSI Logic, Jordan was charged with establishing product positioning and pricing for their production ASIC products. In addition, he generated technical requirements and provided marketing direction to product development teams along with creating business plans for 0.6 micron and 0.35 micron technologies. Before LSI Logic, Jordan was an ASIC Technology Manager and a Corporate Applications Engineer at Valid Logic Systems/Cadence Design Systems and was also associated with Agilent/EEsof, Inc., and Harris Corporation in various engineering capacities. Jordan holds a Master of Science in Engineering Economic Systems from Stanford University in addition to an MBA with distinction from Santa Clara University and a BSEE with honors from the University of Michigan.

 
 

8:45 - 9:15

Fujitsu

Ray Abrishami, Senior Director of Wireless Business Group, Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc.

"SoC for Mobile WiMAX"

WiMAX is fast becoming the Internet technology of choice for a vast array of applications involving simultaneous data, voice and video communications. This technology is characterized by its superior throughput, range, and quality of service. A key challenge facing all communication technologies is how to deliver the promised capabilities and services cost effectively. WiMAX technology is setting out to achieve cost effectiveness in an unprecedented way. SoC class of technologies place at the very center of Mobile WiMAX global deployments offering exceptional integration of capabilities and services, portability, very low power consumption, and remarkably high performance. Fujitsu has outlined a very impressive WiMAX product roadmap consisting of a series of SoC solutions to address specific target application areas. Fujitsu’s vertically integrated semiconductor products sector is able to bring together circuit, IP, design methodology, design libraries, packaging technologies on a platform of a highly scaled COMS technology to address the mobile WiMAX requirements. The complete solution is supported with highly optimized system and media access control SW. An example of our product roadmap is a highly integrated, one-chip mobile baseband SoC, which uses 90nm low-leakage process technology, well-suited for PC cards and other media-rich mobile applications. The mixed-signal SoC has achieved an 18.6Mbps transfer rate in sample installations and lab demonstrations at substantially below 500 mW of power dissipation.

Bio: Ray Abrishami is currently the Senior Director of SoC Engineering and Marketing at Fujitsu Microelectronics America, Inc. (FMA). His responsibilities include product marketing for FMA and SoC development for specific vertical markets such as WiMAX-compliant broadband wireless, VoIP and biometric sensor products. He also oversees the development of FMA solution platforms for SoC involving IP development, acquisition and integration with processor cores and peripheral sub-systems as part of the IPWare™ SoC program. Before joining Fujitsu, Abrishami worked at LSI Logic Corporation where he held various senior engineering management positions in the ASIC Division. His responsibilities included design methodology development, cell architecture, circuit design and design library development functions. He also had engineering management responsibility for the development and delivery of several generations of sub-micron technology products. Abrishami has been closely involved in the definition and development of SoC, intellectual property, top-down VLSI design methodologies and automation tools in the areas of front-end design, physical design and test/testability. Prior to joining LSI Logic, Abrishami held the highest-level engineering and general management positions at Data General Corporation‘s Semiconductor Division where he directed the VLSI system development groups. He led the development and release of VLSI chip sets for three generations of computer systems. Abrishami represented LSI in the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s (SRC) Design Sciences Technical Advisory Board. He was chairman of SRC's Design Sciences Technical Advisory Board in 1996. From 1994-1997, Abrishami was also a member of the Design and Test Technical Working Group (TWG), responsible for the development of the National Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors. Abrishami holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from San Jose State University. He participated in Stanford University’s engineering management program, and is a member of IEEE, Tau Beta Pi and Eta Kappa Nu. He has been granted three U.S. patents in circuits and systems.

 
 

9:15 - 9:45

Broadcom

Dr. Hooman T. Parizi, Principal IC Design Scientist, Broadcom Corporation.

"Power, Performance, and Programmability requirements for Wireless Application SoCs." 

The increasing number of wireless communication standards creates new demands for their platform architectures. In addition to fulfilling high data rate, low cost and low power consumption requirements, they also need to be flexible enough to support multiple standards in a multimode radio system. Traditional Digital Signal Processors (DSPs) cannot provide the target performance for wireless systems. On the other hand, Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) are the favorite solution for wireless systems. ASIC are fast and consume low power, but they are vulnerable to changes. Even changing small features in ASICs requires repeating most of the design and fabrication process, which is expensive and increases the time to market for these systems. The future growth and development of System on Chip (SOC) technologies for wireless communication systems relies on the longer life cycle of new products. The current approach of integrating ASIC solutions is not economically attractive for the new generation of SOC chips, because of all the nonrecurring expenses (NRE) such as mask, engineering, validation, and the shorter life cycle of the product.
Demands for programmability as well as power and performance have made reconfigurable architectures an attractive alternative solution for wireless systems platforms. In this talk HERS, a Heterogeneous Reconfigurable System is introduced as a platform for wireless communication systems. HERS is a set of reconfigurable engines connected through a general high speed bus. Each reconfigurable engine is a specialized reconfigurable architecture for a category of similar algorithms. As each family of algorithms has a limited set of flexibility requirements, their reconfigurable engine platforms can be highly optimized for power and performance. HERS is an optimal solution in terms of power, programmability and performance.


Bio: Hooman T. Parizi is Principal IC Design Scientist at Broadcom Corporation working on design and architecture of high speed DSP chips in DSM technologies. Before joining Broadcom he was with Morpho Technologies, a start up specialized in Reconfigurable DSP architecture and design.
He holds a PHD degree from university of California at Irvine and is the co-author of more than ten papers. His interest is in Computer Architecture, Reconfigurable Computing, Design Automation, and VLSI implementation of DSP algorithms.

 

 
 

9:45 - 10:00

Morning Break

Morning Break

 
 

10:00 - 10:30

Keynote

Jazz Semiconductor

Dr. Marco Racanelli, Vice President of Technology and Engineering, Jazz Semiconductor.

Keynote

Dr. Marco Racanelli is the Vice President of Technology and Engineering at Jazz Semiconductor, an independent pure-play wafer foundry focused primarily on specialty CMOS process technologies optimized for the manufacture of highly integrated analog and mixed-signal semiconductor devices. His responsibilities include leading technology development, modeling, design automation and design service teams.  Before joining Jazz in 2002, Dr. Racanelli held technology and engineering positions at Conexant Systems. He also held management positions with Rockwell Semiconductor Systems prior to the Conexant spin-off in January 1999. He joined Rockwell in 1996 and has since held several posts of increasing responsibility in the area of technology development.  In these positions, Dr. Racanelli helped establish industry leadership in SiGe and BiCMOS technology, and was instrumental in building a strong design support organization for Jazz Semiconductor. Prior to joining Rockwell, Dr. Racanelli worked at Motorola, Inc., where he contributed to bipolar, SiGe and SOI development for Motorola’s Semiconductor Products Sector. He has authored or co-authored more than 50 technical publications and holds 30 U.S. patents.  Dr. Racanelli received his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, and his B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University.

 
 

10:30 - 11:00

 

IBM

Al Yanes, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Systems and Technology Group.

"Power 6 South Bridge."

 

 

Bio: Al Yanes is a Distinguished Engineer in the IBM Systems and Technology Group. He is a member of the Technology Collaboration Services delivery team. He is known throughout IBM as the leader in Peripheral Component Interface (PCI), PCI-X and PCI Express hardware technologies and a key contributor to the development of the PCI-X and PCI Express specification through his work as chair of the PCI-SIG industry standardization committee. He brings more than 20 years of direct experience in the development of Input/Output (I/O) technologies, storage controllers, System i and p and high-end System x servers. Al is an expert in I/O and system hardware architecture, logic design, hardware verification, timing closure, hardware bringup and validation. He is a Master Inventor with 25 patents in I/O technologies. Al joined IBM in 1985 in Tucson, Ariz. working on storage controllers. He continued his storage controller work in San Jose in 1993 and eventually moved to Rochester in 1996 to work on System i PCI bridge chips. Al holds a bachelor in science in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

 
 

11:00 - 11:30

 

Tower Semiconductor

Rafi Nave, CTO, Tower Semiconductor.

 

"Specialized Foundries Bring Distinct Business and Technical Advantages to Chip Companies"

Chip companies that are looking for customized business solutions in order to maximize their long-term, reliable performance, are coming to realize the distinct business and technical advantages of working with specialized foundries.

The foundry market is dominated by a few large players; however, independent specialty foundries have a distinct advantage in being able to deliver highly customized solutions to the chip companies they partner with. Many of the larger foundries won't even bother offering specialized chip design or device solutions below certain quantity thresholds. Needless to say, the market for specialized IC at modest quantities is significant. In addition, specialized foundries also offer an additional advantage by allowing chip companies to increase their supply-chain security. Partnering with a smaller specialized foundry allows chip companies to diversify their production and optimize their time to market, cost and products performance through tailor-made solutions.

Bio: Tower Semiconductor CTO Rafi Nave can address the potential of the specialized foundry business model and discuss the methods that specialty foundries must implement in order to compete in the marketplace. Specialty foundries must expand their production offerings, focusing on dedicated customer service, as well as offer value-adds such as design support and customized business solutions to help customers sustain long-term, reliable performance, while delivering on-time and on-budget results.

 
 

11:30 - 12:00

Grandis

Farhad Tabrizi, Chief Executive Officer and President

Embedded Memory Using Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM).

Spin-Transfer Torque RAM (STT-RAM™) is an emerging memory technology having all the characteristics of an ideal memory “universal memory” and represents a breakthrough over first-generation, field-switched magnetic random access memory (MRAM) technology. STT-RAM’s unique synthesis of non-volatility, fast read and write speed, unlimited endurance, and excellent scalability, provides significant advantages over conventional memory technologies and offers system designers the ability to develop new products with high performance, low power consumption and low cost.  In this talk, I will present embedded STT-RAM solutions for SoC applications. eSTT-RAM has key performance and cost advantages for replacing eSRAM, eFlash and eDRAM.

Farhad Tabrizi is president and chief executive officer of Grandis, Inc. In January 2007, he was appointed to this position, succeeding William Almon, Grandis co-founder, who remains a major shareholder. Tabrizi joined the company from Lexar Media, Inc., where he served as vice president, supply chain management and corporate development. Previously, he was vice president of worldwide marketing for Hynix Semiconductor. In this position, he focused on developing, marketing and supporting Hynix's strategies for growing the corporation's DRAM and flash businesses. Prior to joining Hynix, he held various management and design positions at leading semiconductor companies. Tabrizi brings to Grandis over 23 years experience in senior management, design, marketing, supply chain management, business development, strategic alliances, and industry standard committee chairmanship in the electronics industry. He received his Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis.

 
 

11:30 - 12:00

Lunch

Lunch

 
 

1:00 – 1:30

 

Keynote

 

Intel

Dr. Jeff Parkhurst, Academic Research Programs Manager in the Design Sciences Area.


Keynote: Moore’s Law and Tera-scale computing: Future SoC Trends for Complex Designs.

 
 

 

Multicore, CPUs, DSPs & NoCs for Complex SoCs

Track Chairman: TBD

 
 

1:30 ‒ 2:00

 

Tensilica

Steve Leibson, Technology Evangelist, Tensilica Corporation.

"Component-Level Multimedia Function Blocks for Mobile SoC Designs."

This presentation provides the SOC designer and design manager with the technical details they need to incorporate digital multimedia codecs into their designs without first becoming codec experts. Such black-box design capabilities are increasingly important in a world of rapidly changing multimedia compression standards and constantly shrinking design schedules.  Although video encoding and decoding are complex processes, Tensilica’s family of preconfigured Diamond Audio and Video Engines simplifies the task for an SOC design team by acting as low-power black boxes that SOC designers can incorporate into their portable multimedia and handset chips without becoming H.264/AVC, MPEG-4, and digital-audio experts.  Both the Diamond Video Engine and the Diamond Audio Engine, which is currently in volume production inside of multimedia and mobile-phone handset SOCs, illustrate how processors and ready-to-run firmware can form the core of a complex, high-performance, low-power IP block.  None of the Diamond Audio and Video Engine’s internal operations are visible to the host processor, which is consistent with the IP blocks’
role as component-level SOC building blocks. Hardware designs incorporating Tensilica’s Diamond Audio and Video Engines are not complex. The engines, like the other system components, attach to the main system bus. In some designs, the Diamond HiFi 2 Audio Engine can also serve as the host processor.  Predefined sets of API calls operate the Diamond Audio and Video Engines. The Diamond HiFi 2 Audio Engine’s software library includes a wide range of ready-to-run digital-audio codecs and, similarly, the Diamond Video Engine has a library of video codecs. Using this block-oriented approach to design, SOC development teams can rapidly assemble extremely complicated SOCs from complex, proven IP cores and then program these SOCs with application code to produce unique products for the market.

Bio: Steve Leibson is an experienced hardware and software design engineer, engineering manager, and design consultant. He spent 10 years working at electronic systems companies including HP’s Desktop Computer Division, Auto-Trol Technology (graphics workstations), and Cadnetix (EDA workstations) after earning his BSEE cum laude from Case Western Reserve University. At HP, Auto-Trol, and Cadnetix, he specialized in the design of desktop computers and workstations, especially in the areas of system and I/O design.  He then spent 15 years as an award-winning technology journalist, publishing more than 200 articles in Microprocessor Report, EDN, EE Times, Electronic News, and the Embedded Developers Journal. He served as Editor in Chief of both EDN and the Microprocessor Report and was the founding Editor in Chief of the Embedded Developers Journal. Leibson has just written and published “Designing SOCs with Configured Cores,” a treatise on 21st-century MPSOC design. Twenty years earlier, he wrote and published “The Handbook of Microcomputer Interfacing,” which was published in English, French, and Dutch, and was used as a university textbook for many years. In 2004, he co-authored “Engineering the Complex SOC” with Tensilica’s president and CEO Chris Rowen, which has also been used as a textbook in university classes. He has also contributed chapters to several other SOC design books since joining Tensilica in 2001.

 
 

2:00 ‒ 2:30

 

ARM

Dr. Robert C. Aitken, Fellow, R&D, ARM Corporation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bio: Robert C. Aitken is an R&D Fellow at ARM. His areas of responsibility include library architecture, low power design, and design for manufacturability. He has given tutorials and short courses on several subjects at conferences and universities worldwide. He has published over 50 technical papers, and holds a Ph.D. degree from McGill University in Canada.

 
 

2:30 ‒ 3:00

MIPS Technologies

Kevin D. Kissell, Principal Architect, MIPS Technologies,

 

"Considerations in Selecting Multicore and Multi-threaded Implementations."

 

 

Abstract:
Traditional frequency scaling is becoming less and less economical in today’s SoC designs. Deeper pipelines require more logic, area, power to achieve higher frequencies in a given process. Multicore and multi-threaded designs offer viable alternatives for applications with suitable software models. But should you choose multi-threaded CPUs, multiple independent cores or even multiple multi-threaded cores? The solution depends on the application.  This presentation will discuss the considerations for selecting the best solution, including flexibility, cache, task coordination and partitioning requirements, predictability of CPU requirements, hardware and software complexity, data sharing patterns, and cost/performance models. It will also include discussions of symmetric multi processing (SMP) and coherent multiprocessing (CMP) systems.
 

Bio: Kevin D. Kissell is principal architect at MIPS Technologies, and has been a part of the MIPS architecture development team since 1997. He was first involved in the architecture and design of RISC microprocessors when he joined the original Fairchild Clipper design team in 1983. In between, Kevin has been variously responsible for processor, systems and software architecture, for decoupled access/execute supercomputers at ACRI, massively parallel distributed memory computers at nCUBE, and large-scale shared-memory supercomputers at Evans & Sutherland. His work at MIPS includes having been principal architect of the MIPS MT multi-threading architecture and the SmartMIPS™ extensions for smart cards. He holds a degree in computer science from the University of California at Berkeley.
 

 
 

 3:00 - 3:15

Afternoon Break

Afternoon Break

 
 

3:15 - 3:45

 

Texas Instruments

Dr. Thanh Tran, Embedded Hardware Systems Manager,  Texas Instruments, Inc.

 

“Scalable Video Platform Enabling HD Video Communication.” 



As the migration to high-definition (HD) video communication picks up speed, video-system designers are faced with new challenges related to bandwidth requirements, image quality, and low latency video CODEC flexibility. In this presentation, we are showing the scalable video platform design using multiple TI Digital Media processors that is capable of doing HD encode, decode and transcode simultaneously. This is an ideal platform for video communication and infrastructure applications.

 

Bio: Dr. Thanh Tran has extensive experience in audio, video, computer and communication systems design and is the Infrastructure Video Systems Manger at Texas Instruments Incorporated. At TI, he is leading a hardware/software systems team to develop reference designs and frameworks for high speed DSP/SOCs. He has held other senior design positions at Compaq Computer, ReplayTV, Eagle Wireless Incorporated, Bose Corporation and Zenith Electronics Corporation. Tran is an IEEE Senior member and currently serves on the IEEE System-On-Chip (SOCC) Organizing Committee as the Technical Program Chair, and the IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) as the Technical Program Committee member. He has published over 17 technical papers and current holds 20 issued patents related to designs of video, audio, computer and communication systems. Here is a partial list of Dr. Tran’s recent accomplishments.

• Leading a hardware and software systems team to develop the next generation scalable HD video platform.
• Led a team to create and productize the low cost and high performance video SOCs, DM643x.
• Led a team to productize the Davinci video platform, DM644x. This includes DDR, video and audio designs.
• Led a team to productize the C6455 1GHz device. This includes DDR2 533 and multi-gigahertz SRIO designs.

Tran’s doctoral research, gated direct sequence spread spectrum clock distribution system, led to three patents pending and one startup company, X-EMI, in Austin, Texas. He is currently an adjunct faculty member at Rice University where he is teaching audio and video and embedded systems designs. Tran received a BSEE degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois and Master of Electrical Engineering and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering degrees from the University of Houston, Houston, Texas.
 

 

 
 

3:45 - 4:15

 

ST Microelectronics

Antonio-Marcello Coppola, Head of the Grenoble Research Laboratory, ST Microelectronics.
 

"ST NoC: The Next Generation On Chip Communication Architecture for Consumer Applications."

Market, application and technology trends lead to new challenges for the on-chip
Interconnections: a packet-switched on-chip micro-network (called in literature Network on Chip) is foreseen to be the natural evolution of the current bus-based solution, for overcoming its lack in scalability, performance, power consumption and reliability. In this presentation we will present the low cost, high performance STBUS evolution, called Spidergon STNoC (S-STNoC). S-STNoC, based on a scalable, regular, point-to-point topology combined with low complexity hardware, is bringing more performance and less area/power compared to standard busses.

Bio: Marcello Coppola is working for STmicroelectronics, he is Head of the Grenoble Research Laboratory within “Advanced System Technology”, a corporate research organization in ST. He studied computer science at Pisa University. In 1992, he received his Laurea degree and started working at the Transputer architecture group of INMOS, Bristol (UK). For 2 and half years he worked on a research program regarding the architecture of the C104 router.
His research interests include several aspects of design technologies for System on Chip, with particular emphasis to Network on Chip, MPSoC architecture, Programming Modeling and system level design. His publication record covers publications in the filed of simulation, modeling, SoC architecture and on-chip communication network. He wrote chapters for different books. He was one the members for the OSCI language working group. He contributed to SystemC2.0 language definition and OSCI standardization. He has chaired international conferences on SoC design and helped to organize several others. He is program committee member of DATE, FDL, CODES+ISSS, DAC. He is cited in Marquis “Who’s Who in Engineering” and IBC biographies.

 
 

4:15 - 4:45

 

NXP Semiconductors

Selliah Rathnam, Fellow, NXP Semiconductors

 

 

"Nano-scale SoCs for Connected Consumer Application."

 

The ongoing trend toward nano-scale CMOS SoC integration is essential for the connected consumer; however, it creates challenges due to new device characteristics and the complexity resulting from the high number of functions in one die. In this talk, we will illustrate how NXP Semiconductors addresses the requirements for the connected consumer, including low power, vibrant media capabilities, multi-standard communication pipes and consumer price points.
 

Bio: Selliah Rathnam is a Fellow at NXP Semiconductors, based in San Jose, California. He is responsible for the strategic direction of NXP’s System-on-Chip (SOC) infrastructure technologies, ensuring the company’s SOC solutions continue to meet and exceed customer expectations. Over the course of his ten year career at NXP, formerly Philips Semiconductors, Selliah held a variety of positions relating to SOC architecture and products, including: chief SOC architect for SOC products for digital TV applications; architect for VLIW-Based Trimedia CPU Projects; and architecture group manager for Digital TV SOC products. Prior to Philips Semiconductors, Selliah served as senior director of architecture of Silicon Access Networks. He also worked at Sun Microsystems for seven years, participating in various reduced instruction set computer (RISC) CPU projects and a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW)-based CPU research project.  Selliah graduated with a Master of Science in computer science from Texas Tech University, and obtained a Bachelor of Science in electronics and communication engineering from the University of Madras, India. He is currently pursuing a Master of Business Administration at Santa Clara University.

 

 
 

4:45 - 5:15

 

Texas A&M University

Praveen Bhojwani, Texas A&M University
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bio: Praveen Bhojwani is a PhD candidate of Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. He received his MS in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2003 and his B. Tech (Honors) in Computer Science & Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, India in 2001.  Praveen’s research area has primarily been in the domain of networks-on-chip (NoC). He has published a number of papers identifying important design issues in NoC-based design. His research interests also include power-aware system design, computer architecture and design verification.

 
 

Panel

Panel:

 

“Emerging Trends for Complex SoCs: From Advanced Multicore/CPUs/DSPs To Innovative Embedded Memories”

 

 
 

5:15 - 6:15

 

EDN

 

Novelics

 

MIPS

 

NVIDIA

 

BDTI

 

Tensilica

Maury Wright, Editorial Director, EDN Worldwide

Moderator

Maury Wright is Editorial Director of EDN Worldwide, which includes EDN magazine and EDN.com (the Internet home of EDN, Electronic News, and Electronic Business).

Maury graduated from Auburn University in 1978 with a BSEE and a curriculum emphasis on digital design and development with early microprocessors. Subsequently, he took graduate-level courses at Auburn and San Diego State University with an emphasis on microprocessors and digital-signal processing.

Maury's engineering experience includes stints at San Diego-based General Dynamics Convair division and The Computation Company. At General Dynamics, he worked designing ground support equipment for the Tomahawk cruise missile. At Computation, he worked on early microprocessor-based office systems and on ophthalmic instruments based on microprocessors.

Maury first joined EDN in 1983. During his career, he has worked in several capacities at EDN and was also the founding editor of CommVerge magazine (may it rest in peace). Maury has specialized in covering computers and peripherals, with emphasis on enabling technologies in the multimedia area and voice/data/video convergence.

As editorial director, Maury spends time in EDN's offices in San Jose and Waltham, Mass., as well as his home office near San Diego.
 

1: Dr. Cyrus Afghahi, CEO, Novelics.

2: Mike Uhler, Chief Technology Officer, MIPS Technologies.

3: Jonah Alben, Vice President of GPU Engineering, NVIDIA.

4: Jeff Bier, Co-Founder and President, Berkeley Design Technology. 

5: Grant Martin, Chief Scientist, Tensilica.

 

 
   

Dr. Cyrus Afghahi, CEO, Novelics.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Cyrus Afghahi is a semiconductor industry professional with a successful track record of leading technology based organizations. Prior to co-founding Novelics in 2005, Dr. Afghahi was Technical Director for the Office of the CTO at Broadcom Corporation. He has over 20 years experience leading strategic technology initiatives in low power and high speed VLSI designs for advanced, high performance applications. Prior to joining Broadcom, Dr. Afghahi held key technical and management positions at Intel Corporation, Ericson Radio and Carlsted. He received his PhD in Linkoping, Sweden in 1985. He holds more than 60 patents.

 

 
   

Mike Uhler, Chief Technology Officer, MIPS Technologies.

 

 

 

Panelist

 


Michael Uhler brings more than 25 years of engineering experience in the semiconductor and computer industry to his role as Chief Technology Officer at MIPS Technologies, Inc. He is responsible for driving the strategy and vision of the MIPS Architecture, core and software products and related MIPS standards for MIPS Technologies

Mr. Uhler has been part of the MIPS Technologies team since 1994, when he joined the MIPS Group of Silicon Graphics, Inc. as director of engineering. Prior to that, he spent 15 years at Digital Equipment Corporation, working on SMP operating systems and system design, and as the lead architect for VAX microprocessor chips. Most recently Mr. Uhler was Vice President, Systems, Architecture, and Software Products at MIPS. Mr. Uhler holds 26 patents in computer architecture, hardware and software design, and has an additional 11 patents pending.  Mr. Uhler earned his BSEE and MSCS degrees from the University of Arizona.

 
   

Jonah Alben, Vice President of GPU Engineering, NVIDIA.

 

 

Panelist

 

 

Jonah Alben has been Vice President of GPU Engineering for NVIDIA since January 2004. Mr. Alben joined the Company in October 1997 as an ASIC design engineer. Prior to joining, Mr. Alben was a design engineer at Silicon Graphics. Mr. Alben holds B.S.C.S.E. and M.S.E.E. degrees from Stanford University.

 

 
   

Jeff Bier, Co-Founder and president, Berkeley Design Technology. 

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Jeff Bier is co-founder and president of Berkeley Design Technology, Inc. (www.BDTI.com), a respected benchmarking and consulting company focused on digital signal processing applications. BDTI's helps technology providers build and sell winning products, and helps system developers to reduce risk and speed time to market.

Jeff is a recognized industry expert, frequently presenting seminars on signal processing applications and technologies. He is also editor of BDTI’s respected technology analysis reports, including “Buyer’s Guide to DSP Processors,” now in its sixth edition. Jeff is also Editor in Chief and a frequent contributor on InsideDSP.com, an online newsletter dedicated to digital signal processing technology. Jeff earned B.S. and M.S. degrees from Princeton University and U.C. Berkeley.
 

 
   

Grant Martin, Chief Scientist, Tensilica. 

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Grant Martin is a Chief Scientist at Tensilica, Inc. in Santa Clara, California. Before that, Grant worked for Burroughs in Scotland for 6 years; Nortel/BNR in Canada for 10 years; and Cadence Design Systems for 9 years, eventually becoming a Cadence Fellow in their Labs. He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Mathematics (Combinatorics and Optimization) from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 1977 and 1978.

Grant is a co-author of ESL Design and Verification: A Prescription for Electronic System Level Methodology, 2007, published by Morgan Kaufmann. He is also co-author of Surviving the SOC Revolution: A Guide to Platform-Based Design, 1999, and System Design with SystemC, 2002, and a co-editor of the books Winning the SoC Revolution: Experiences in Real Design, and UML for Real: Design of Embedded Real-Time Systems, June 2003, all published by Springer (originally by Kluwer). In 2004, he co-wrote with Vladimir Nemudrov the first book on SoC design published in Russian by Technosphera, Moscow. Recently, he co-edited Taxonomies for the Development and Verification of Digital Systems (Springer, 2005), and UML for SoC Design (Springer, 2005).

He has also presented many papers, talks and tutorials, and participated in panels, at a number of major conferences. He co-chaired the VSI Alliance Embedded Systems study group in the summer of 2001, and was co-chair of the DAC Technical Programme Committee for Methods for 2005 and 2006. His particular areas of interest include system-level design, IP-based design of system-on-chip, platform-based design, and embedded software. He is a senior member of the IEEE.
 

 
 

4:30 pm - 8:30 pm

 

Exhibit

Conference Exhibit & Reception Open

 
       

 

 

       
 

8:00 - 8:15

Farhad Mafie, President and CEO of Savant Company Inc.

 

"Welcome and Opening Remarks, Technology/Market Trends."

 

Farhad has over 20 years of experience in semiconductor and computer businesses and more than 10 years of university-level teaching experience.  Farhad is the former Vice President of Marketing/Business Development and Technical Sales Engineering at Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. He was responsible for marketing the entire Toshiba standard ICs (RISC/CISC CPUs, Configurable CPUs, DSPs, Bluetooth, Wireless ICs, RFID, MPEG-4, CCD/CMOS, Analog ICs, Automotive ICs, etc.).  He was also responsible for engineering development for Toshiba's Embedded and Digital Consumer products & solutions based on ASSP and SoC Models.

 

Farhad established Toshiba's on-line Tech-Support System as well as Toshiba's on-line System Solution Selling methodologies for all Toshiba's products in the North American markets. These on-line systems were adopted by Toshiba on a worldwide basis.  He also developed Toshiba's ASSP Business Unit and Technical Sales Engineering Team as two brand new organizations for the company.  Farhad has also worked at Lucent Technologies on marketing communications ICs, Toshiba Information Systems on product definition for Toshiba's notebooks and handheld products, Unisys on designing new processors and computer systems, and MSI Data on designing data collection products.  He has a Master of Science and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronic Engineering from California State University, Fullerton.  His combined business and academic experience has given Farhad a unique ability to effectively communicate complex new technologies to business professionals at all levels, as well as the ability to foresee emerging leading-edge technologies. Farhad is an author and a translator, and he writes articles for a variety of journals and Web-based magazines on technology and political affairs.

     
 

8:15 am - 12:00 am

Memory sub-system Issues, Advances & Trends for

Complex SoC Designs

Track Chairman: Dr. Nader Bagherzadeh, University of California, Irvine.

 
   

Dr. Nader Bagherzadeh, University of California, Irvine.

 



Dr. Nader Bagherzadeh has been involved in research and development in the areas of computer architecture, reconfigurable computing, VLSI chip design, and computer graphics. For almost ten years ago, he was the first researcher working on the VLSI design of a Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) processor.   Since then, he has been working on multithreaded superscalars and their application to signal processing and general purpose computing.  His current project at UC, Irvine is concerned with the design of coarse grain reconfigurable pixel processors for video applications.  The proposed architecture, called MorphoSys, is versatile enough to be used for digital signal processing tasks such as the ones encountered in wireless communications and sonar processing.  DARPA and NSF fund the MorphoSys project (total support $1.5 million).  Dr. Bagherzadeh was the Chair of Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Henry Samueli School of Engineering at University of California, Irvine.  Before joining UC, Irvine, from 1979 to 1984, he was a member of the technical staff (MTS) at AT&T Bell Laboratories, developing the hardware and software components of the next-generation digital switching systems (#5 ESS).  Dr. Bagherzadeh holds a Ph.D. in computer engineering from The University of Texas at Austin.  As a Professor, he has published more than a hundred articles in peer-reviewed journals and conference papers in areas such as advanced computer architecture, system software techniques, and high performance algorithms.  He has trained hundreds of students who have assumed key positions in software and computer systems design companies in the past twelve years.  He has been a Principal Investigator (PI) or Co-PI on more than $2.5 million worth of research grants for developing next-generation computer systems for solving computationally intensive applications related to signal and image processing.

 
 

8:15 - 8:45

Virage Logic

Virage Logic Corporation, Luigi Ternullo, Product Marketing Manager, STAR Memory System, Virage Logic Corporation
 


"Achieving optimal yield in SoC designs"

 


The semiconductor industry has evolved to the point of a true competitive environment, where time-to-market and cost competitiveness are the two major factors that determine if a product is successful in the market place. Cost competitiveness is mainly driven by die size and ultimately yield. Die size and yield optimization are not new requirements to the semiconductor industry, but how these requirements have been addressed as compared to proposals for addressing future needs may slightly differ.  Embedded memory IP can be a large component in the yield equation associated with SoC designs. Embedded memories in a SoC design can also be a facilitator to improving yield. State of the art design techniques as well as the intelligent use of redundancy are required to ensure high yielding memories. However, more often than not, issues arise in silicon and manifest themselves in embedded memories. Having the ability to quickly and easily locate the source of the silicon issue can be paramount to realizing aggressive yield targets. To enable quick and easy identification of silicon issues that typically manifest themselves in the embedded memory, designers must plan to incorporate an embedded memory test solution that can also be controlled through a tester to quickly and easily identify potential silicon issues.

Bio: Luigi Ternullo serves as Product Marketing Manager of Virage Logic’s STAR Memory System™ for embedded, on-chip test and repair of multi-megabit memories. Prior to joining Virage Logic in 2006, Ternullo held technical marketing management positions and senior engineering management positions at Agere, Vanguard International Semiconductor, and IBM. His range of experience includes SRAM design, memory and logic built-in self-test (MBIST and LBIST). Mr. Ternullo also holds over 25 patents in BIST and memory design, and has authored several BIST papers. He holds a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rochester Institute of Technology, and M.B.A. from Lehigh University.

 

 
 

8:45 - 9:15

Micron

Jim Cooke, Director of Application Engineering, Micron Technologies.

 

"On-Chip or Off-Chip Trends?"

One of the most important questions designers are asking today is whether to integrate Flash technology on-chip or move it off-chip. In this presentation, we will discuss the growing acceptance of off-chip NAND Flash technology in embedded applications such as set-top boxes, MP3 players, digital cameras, and new smart cell phones. In the process, we will cover trends, reliability challenges, and advanced new features and security enhancements in NAND technology. We will also explore new possibilities in performance and power trade-offs in the smaller geometries as we move toward mass production on 90nm—and in the near future on 65nm. And finally, we will present packaging trends that present a feasible and promising option to integrating on-chip memory.

Jim Cooke is a Director of Application Engineering for Micron’s Mobile Memory Group. Prior to joining Micron, he managed the applications engineering group and hardware engineering team for Toshiba America Electronic Components. Mr. Cooke has over 20 years of hands-on systems-level design experience in embedded applications and digital consumer markets. He holds a BSEE from the University of Massachusetts.

 

 
 

9:15 - 9:45

Rambus

Dr. Tom Sheffler, Senior Principal Engineer.

 

"Managing Complexity in a PHY Verification Flow"

Leading-edge memory interface PHY design requires custom flows built with a variety of tools that use a multiplicity of design representations. A verification team supporting geographically distributed teams, each with multiple tools and multiple representations can be confronted with overwhelming complexity if the
necessary number of model variations and combinations is not planned for and managed in a rigorous manner. This talk describes our experiences developing a means to manage necessary design variations and models, and the correlations between them. In the process of designing a database-driven configuration-based flow, we provided enhanced flexibility while increasing stability and reproducibility. We describe our goals, our organization and how we would like verification tools to support enhanced design configuration in the future.

Tom Sheffler is a Senior Principal Engineer at Rambus. He joined Rambus twelve years ago and has served in the verification and architecture groups. Tom received his PhD and MS in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, and his BSEE from the University of Virginia. He holds four patents. At Rambus, Tom was a lead in the verification of the logical architecture of the Direct RDRAM as well as the XDR DRAM and PHY interface. Tom has addressed the issues of how to accurately capture the behavior of Rambus mixed-signal designs in means that are useful as communication tools between people and software. Previous to joining Rambus, Tom worked on compilers and runtime systems for parallel supercomputers while at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at NASA Ames.

 
 

9:45 - 10:00

Morning Break

Morning Break

 
 

10:00 - 10:30

National Semiconductor

Keynote

Dr. Ahmad Bahai, National Fellow and Chief Technology Officer, NS Labs, National Semiconductor. Adjunct Professor, Stanford University, UC Berkeley.
 

Keynote

 

 

Bio: Dr. Bahai is recognized throughout the industry and academia as a leading expert on wireless systems. He joined National in January 2000 as part of the acquisition of Algorex, a company he co-founded. Since becoming a part of the company, Dr. Bahai and his team in Fremont, CA have developed a novel WCDMA architecture and brought it to prototype stage. Prior to founding Algorex, he was a technical manager for the Wireless Communications Group of AT&T Bell Laboratories and a staff scientist for Teknekron Communications.  Dr. Bahai is a consulting professor for the Electrical Engineering Department of Stanford University and a visiting professor at UC Berkeley. He is the author of over 30 technical papers and reports and holds five key patents in the Communications and Signal Processing field. Since 1998, Dr. Bahai has been an editor of IEEE Communication Letters and keynote speaker for many key technical conferences and seminars. Several of his papers were awarded Best Invited Papers/Best Keynotes. In 1999 he published the first textbook in OFDM,  "Multi-Carrier Digital Communications, Theory & Applications of OFDM," which is widely used in academia and industry. Dr. Bahai has an MSEE degree from the University of London, Imperial College and a PhD EE from the University of California at Berkeley.

 
 

10:30 - 11:00

Innovative Silicon

Jeff Mitchell, Director of Technical Marketing, Innovative Silicon.

 

 

"Memory for the New Millennium – Keeping Moor’s Law Alive."
 

 


Continuing to scale along Moore’s Law to smaller die sizes and lower cost is essential to the future growth and continued success of the semiconductor industry. Ever-smaller geometries are making it difficult to shrink not just logic transistors but embedded memory structures as well. Memory consumes the largest portion of the die area of many SoC designs, and with increased leakage current affecting embedded SRAM and capacitor formation becoming progressively more difficult at every embedded DRAM generation, a new technology breakthrough is needed in order to eliminate the risk of SOCs becoming memory limited. This presentation will discuss how a true, single-transistor memory technology is once again getting memory scaling back onto the Moore’s Law curve. This new type of memory is being designed into embedded applications as well as being adopted by the standalone DRAM industry. With the potential for the speed of embedded SRAM and the density of embedded DRAM, there is now a new solution to many of the functionality and cost challenges facing SoC designers today.

Bio:  Jeff Mitchell is Director of Technical Marketing at Innovative Silicon. He has more than 20 years of experience in the electronics industry and has been awarded several patents. He has had a varied career, holding positions in engineering, marketing, and business development. Mitchell has a B.S. in Engineering from Harvey Mudd College.
 

 
 

11:00 - 11:30

Kilopass Technology

Craig Rawlings, Director of Marketing, Kilopass Technology Inc.

 

"Embedded Non-Volatile Memory (NVM)."

 

 

As mask costs skyrocket for SOC designs on advanced process geometries, designers are highly motivated to develop new approaches for reducing multiple chipsets into a single SOC platform solution. Such a Platform SOC must support multiple product feature sets, interface variations, and individual feature functionality that are all configurable in post-production. SOC application-specific functionality can be configured through programmable firmware, firmware parameters, and configurable hardware, utilizing embedded non-volatile memory (NVM).

Bio: Craig Rawlings has more than 15 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. Prior to joining Kilopass, Craig held management and executive-level positions at Hewlett-Packard, Actel, Resilience, and Progress Software. Kilopass is Craig's fourth early stage start-up experience. Craig's first start-up right out of engineering school was Cericor which was later purchased by HP. He was also part of the initial team at Actel and led that company's business expansion in the US, Japan, and Asia Pacific participating in Actel's subsequent IPO. Craig holds a B.S.E.E. degree and a Masters of Business Administration from Brigham Young University.

 

 
 

11:30 - 12:00

Novelics

Dr. Gil Winograd, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder, Novelics Corporation.
 

 

"Innovative Embedded Memories."

 

 

 

 

Bio: Prior to co-founding Novelics, Gil Winograd was a Principal Scientist at Broadcom Corporation responsible for the design of leading-edge memories, high speed full-custom circuits, and compiler and software automation processes for custom circuits. Dr. Winograd brings to Novelics a diverse background of software design, IC design, and device physics and fabrication. Dr. Winograd received his BSEE from the University of Illinois, Champaign in 1991, his MSEE from the University of Illinois in 1994 in Computer Engineering, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000, specializing in lithography. He has six technical publications and more than 30 patents issued or pending.

 

 
 

12:00 - 1:00

 

Lunch

Multicore, CPUs, DSPs & NoCs for Complex SoCs

Track Chairman: Farhad Mafie, Savant Company Inc.

 
 

1:00 - 2:00

 

Panel

Panel:

 

Emerging Wireless Chips: The Development & Integration Challenges 

 
 

 

Inside GNSS

 

Trimble

 

Broadcom

 

SiRF Technology

 

Qualcomm

 

Freescale

 

Glen Gibbons, Inside GNSS, Editor and Managing Partner.

 

 

 

Moderator

 

Glen Gibbons, the editor and managing partner, has spent eighteen years covering and commenting on GNSS news and developments. He was the founding editor of GPS World, Galileo’s World, and GPS World Newsletter. He and partner Eliza Schmidkunz launched Inside GNSS in January 2006.

 

Panelists

 

1: Bruce Peetz, Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Trimble.

2: Charles Abraham, Director of Engineering for the GPS Business Unit of Broadcom, Corporation.

3: Sanjai Kohli, Chief Technical Officer, SiRF Technology.

4: Dr. Cormac Conroy, VP Engineering, Qualcomm

5: Clint Powell, Chief Architect and Global Platform Systems and Architecture Manager, WCO, Freescale.

 

 
   

Bruce Peetz, Vice President of Advanced Technologies, Trimble.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Bruce Peetz has been with Trimble Navigation Limited for nearly 20 years in a variety of engineering and management positions, and is currently serving as the Vice President of Advanced Technology and Systems. Prior to Trimble he was with Hewlett-Packard and Hughes Aircraft Company. A graduate of MIT, Mr. Peetz spent much of his career in businesses that depend on combining different technologies, particularly in integrating mixed signal systems, most recently dealing with GPS, optical, and laser positioning systems integrated with communication.

 

 
   

Charles Abraham, Director of Engineering for the GPS Business Unit of Broadcom, Corporation.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Charles Abraham is Director of Engineering for the GPS Business Unit of Broadcom, Corporation. He was previously co-founder and Executive Vice-President of Engineering at Global Locate, which was acquired by Broadcom in July 2007. He is a pioneer in the fields of assisted GPS and high sensitivity receiver architecture and holds dozens of issued patents in the field. Mr. Abraham was a Vice President at Magellan Corporation where he focused on the development of precision surveying systems. Previously he was with Trimble Navigation, where he contributed to the design of low cost GPS chipsets. Before entering the GPS field, Mr. Abraham worked in the field of satellite communications at Hughes Aircraft. He holds an MSEE from the University of Southern California and a BSEE from the University of California at San Diego.

 

 
   

Sanjai Kohli, Chief Technical Officer, SiRF Technology.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Sanjai Kohli is the chief technology officer (CTO) of SiRF Technology Inc. Previously he was the founder and CTO of Truespan, which developed semiconductors for mobile video applications. Previously he was a cofounder, president, and CEO of WirelessHome (WH), which developed a point to multipoint system. WH was acquired by Proxim/Western Multiplex in 2001. At Proxim he was the vice-president/general manager for the Multipoint Systems Division, responsible for the Tsunami and Quick bridge product lines. Prior to WH, Kohli was the cofounder, president, and vice-president of engineering of SiRF Technology. At SiRF he was responsible for the development of the first two generations of GPS chipsets and software, including Sirfstar II. Prior to SiRF, he founded Software Technology & Systems (STS) that developed smart munitions and spread spectrum technology, serving as its president and CEO. Kohli holds a B.S. in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology–Bombay and an M.S. in system science from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. He has more than 20 published papers and 20 issued patents.

 

 
   

Dr. Cormac Conroy, VP Engineering, Qualcomm.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Dr. Cormac S. G. Conroy received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994 for work on high-speed A/D conversion in CMOS.
After graduating, he was at IBM Storage Systems Division in San Jose, and in August 1994 joined DataPath Systems where he worked on highly integrated mixed-signal ICs for storage and communications. At DataPath, he led the design and development efforts in CMOS ADSL analog front end ICs over multiple product generations. DataPath was acquired by LSI Logic in May 2000.
In early 2001, with Dr. Beomsup Kim, he co-founded Berkäna Wireless Inc., a Silicon Valley-based fabless semiconductor company developing highly integrated CMOS RF solutions for cellular phone applications. Berkana was acquired by Qualcomm in 2006. Since January 2006, he has been VP Engineering at the Qualcomm Silicon Valley organization and is responsible for wireless connectivity chipset solutions including GPS and navigation.
 

 
   

Clint Powell, Chief Architect and Global Platform Systems and Architecture Manager, WCO, Freescale.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

Clint Powell is responsible for defining the next generation System on a Chip (SoC), System in a Package (SiP) and Platform in a Package (PiP) architectures and setting the technical strategy for the Wireless Connectivity Operations at Freescale. By combining novel SoC and Radio Transceiver Architectures with State of the Art Process Technology and Packaging Concepts, he has established leading edge SiP and PiP products for the wireless connectivity space. Previous to this, Clint was the WPAN Chief Architect and a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.

Prior to Freescale, Clint was with Motorola for 15 years and was a Member of the Technical Staff and a Science Advisory Board Associate. He held various roles in Applied Research, Advanced Technology, Wireless Systems Integration and the Semiconductor Products Sector where he led the architectural definition of communications and video systems. Prior to that, he led the development of digital and analog signal processing communications systems for digital and mixed-signal subsystems. In addition, he defined a system definition and modeling to implementation flow that is used today.

Clint is the author of several papers in the area of wireless communications and holds 29 U.S. Patents. He currently serves as the Chair of the IEEE 802.15 4c Task Group (TG4C) to define an 802.15.4 Standard that meets the Chinese Regulatory Requirements for the 700 MHz band. He also serves as the Secretary of the ZigBee Qualification Group (ZQG) in the ZigBee Alliance. Previously he served on the IEEE 802.15.4b (IEEE 802.15.4 2006) standards committee as the PHY Editor and as the Vice Chair of the Application Framework Group (AFG) in the ZigBee Alliance.

 

 
 

2:00 - 2:30

Carnegie Mellon University

Keynote

Dr. Rob Rutenbar, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Director of the National FCRP Focus Center for Circuit & System Solutions. Carnegie Mellon University

Keynote:  "From Wall Street to Silicon Valley: Using the Mathematics of Money and Risk for Fast Statistical IC Design"

Moore's law device scaling dramatically increases the statistical variability with which tomorrow’s chips must contend. Devices with atomic dimensions don't have deterministic parameters: every behavior we want to model is a messy smear of probability. How should we attack such problems? Is slow, expensive Monte Carlo analysis our only option? Is the silicon community unique in facing such problems? As it turns out, problems in computational finance and risk analysis share many of the characteristics that challenge us in statistical circuit analysis: high dimensionality, profound nonlinearity, stringent accuracy requirements, and expensive analysis (i.e., circuit simulation). In this talk I'll show examples of adapting computational ideas from Wall Street for use in the silicon world. I'll show how the same methods used to price complex securities can be adapted to compute silicon yields, giving speedups of 2x - 50x. I'll show how methods used to analyze the statistics of rare events (like the size of the biggest wave in a hurricane like Katrina) can be used to analyze failures in SRAM, giving speedups of 20,000x. Some of our best engineering students have found careers on Wall Street in recent years. Work such as this suggests that this "brain drain" need not be such a one-way thing.

BIO: Rob A. Rutenbar received the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1984, and then joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University. He currently holds the Stephen Jatras Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He has worked on tools for custom circuit synthesis and optimization for over 20 years. In 1998 he co-founded Neolinear Inc. to commercialize the first practical synthesis tools for analog designs. He served as Neolinear's Chief Scientist until its acquisition by Cadence in 2004. He is the founding Director of the US national Focus Research Center for Circuits and System Solutions -- called "C2S2". C2S2 is a CMU-led consortium of 17 US universities and over 50 faculty funded by the US semiconductor industry and US government to address future circuit challenges. He has won many awards over his career, including the 2001 Semiconductor Research Corporation Aristotle Award for excellence in education, and most recently, the 2007 IEEE Circuits & Systems Industrial Pioneer Award. His work has been featured in venues ranging from "EE Times" to "The Economist" magazine. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.
 

 
   

Innovative Tools & Solutions: For Complex SoC Designs

Track Chairman:  Dr. Jim Lipman, Vice President, Cain Communications

 
   

Dr. Jim Lipman, Vice President, Cain Communications



Track Chairman:  Dr. Jim Lipman


 

 

Jim Lipman is currently Vice President of Client Services at Cain Communications, an agency providing marketing communications services to semiconductor, IP, EDA and other high-tech companies of all sizes. His prior work experience includes editorial positions at EDN and TechOnLine, the latter where he was Content Director; marketing and training positions at VLSI Technology; and various engineering jobs at Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments. Jim has an Electrical Engineering Doctorate from SMU and an MBA from Golden Gate University.

 

 
 

2:30 - 3:00

Synopsys

Navraj Nandra, Director of Product Marketing for the Mixed-Signal Products, Synopsys.

 


"Embedding Multi-Gb/s Serial Interconnects into 65 nm and 45 nm SoC’s."
 


High speed serial interconnects such as PCI Express 2.0 and 10 Gigabit Ethernet are becoming available as IP (Intellectual Property). And these blocks and are being integrated into 65 nm and 45 nm CMOS SoC’s and FPGA's. The multi-gigabit per second speed, complexity of the protocol, influence of the channel and variations in the deep sub-micron technology is resulting in new design challenges not only for the IP developer but also for the SoC integrator – in this case the consumer of the IP. Although equally skilled in design there are differences in the IP development and SoC integration tasks. The IP development team must ensure that they deliver all the necessary views for successful integration, without knowing in detail the SoC environment, and in most cases this involves thorough validation of functionality in the target foundry through test-chips. The SoC team must be able to integrate the IP and perform all the necessary chip-level verification. This is causing designers to re-think the verification and validation tasks of the IP. For example, pre-layout verification in terms of device mis-match and Monte Carlo simulations is becoming a poorer predictor of performance, increasing the importance of understanding the impact systematic variations based on physical changes to the device thereby necessitating detailed post-layout parasitic extracted simulations. Silicon test-chips where visibility into the link performance, supply/substrate noise rejection and ESD are the most important tasks required for validation. The necessary tasks of both the IP developer and integrator to ensure a fully functional SoC will be presented.

Bio: Navraj Nandra joined Synopsys in February 2005 as Director of Product Marketing for the mixed-signal products that include SERDES, USB and DDR2. He has worked in the semiconductor industry since the mid 80's as an analog/mixed signal IC designer for Philips Semiconductors, austriamicrosystems, (San Jose & Austria) and EM-Marin (Switzerland). He has been responsible for the complete design of a number of analog front ends in application areas such as digital audio, RFID and automotive. He joined Synopsys from Barcelona Design where he was Director of Application Engineering. During his four years at Barcelona he was responsible for pre- and post-sales support for Barcelona's analog synthesis technology. Navraj holds a masters degree in Microelectronics, majoring in analog IC design, from Brunel University and a post-graduate diploma in Process Technology from Middlesex University. He has presented at numerous technical conferences on mixed-signal design, analog IP and analog synthesis/EDA. He has been awarded patents in RFID design.

 

 
 

3:00 - 3:30

Cadence Design Systems

Steve Carlson, Cadence Design Systems.


"Economic Impact of Low-Power Design."

 

As a broader set of products begin have power dissipation move to center stage as a primary design criteria, the costs associated with the first time deployment of advanced low power design techniques need to be anticipated, measured, and managed.

The costs come in the form of methodology and tool education, re-tooling of the design environment, and the efficiency of the solution adopted. The latter issue, design efficiency, can be the single biggest contributor to "cost", which manifests itself in the forms of partial realization of power savings, schedule slips, and design failures.

 

Bio: Steve is a Vice President on the Cadence Synthesis team.  In that role he is focused on marketing the solution for the best Quality-of-Silicon (chip speed, area, power, test measured after wires).  Carlson reports to Chi-Ping Hsu, Corporate VP for New Synthesis at Cadence.  Steve joined Cadence in April in 2003 via the Get2Chip acquisition, where he was the VP of Marketing.  Prior to Get2Chip, Steve was the CEO of Tharas Systems, a hardware acceleration company.  Steve has also held various management positions at Escalade, LSI Logic, United Technologies and Synopsys.  At Synopsys, Steve was a part of the original Design Compiler technical team responsible for timing analysis and optimization.  Steve was the author of the industry’s first book on high-level design: Introduction to HDL-based Design Using VHDL.  Steve has a BSEE, a BSCS, and an MSEE, all from the University of Colorado.

 
 

3:30 - 3:45

Afternoon Break

Afternoon Break

 
 

The SPIRIT Consortium

 

(Mentor Graphics)

Bill Chown, Product Group Director for the System-Level Engineering Division at Mentor Graphics, Representing The SPIRIT Consortium. 

"Design Flow integration with IP-XACT"

The IP-XACT specifications provide machine-readable descriptions of IP to enable automated IP and SoC configuration, integration and verification in multi-vendor design flows. IP-XACT standardizes a meta-data format for IP description and assembly, in use to complete some of the industry's leading SoC devices. The applications of IP-XACT encompass the use of automated tools, generators and IP integration for synthesis, verification, documentation and other implementation flows, and span design configuration and integration requirements for RTL, ESL and advanced verification methodologies.

Bio: Bill Chown, currently a product group director for the system-level engineering division at Mentor Graphics, moved to the semiconductor industry with Intersil Semiconductors, where he went from designing mixed signal and DSP systems, at chip and board level in the UK, to managing projects through to layout and production test. He subsequently worked in EDA and test software development in Europe and the US with Mentor Graphics, Summit Design/TSSI, Integrated Measurement Systems and Credence. A twenty-five year veteran, Bill currently specializes in TLM and RTL platform-based design and verification. He has been involved with standards activities for several years, serving in the CFI, ECSI, and STIL initiatives, is past chair of the TTTC TAC on Virtual Test, is currently a member of the STIL working group, and is a board member for The SPIRIT Consortium and of OMG. Bill earned an Electronic Engineering degree from the University of Wales and an MBA from the University of Oregon.

 
 

3:45 - 4:15

Actel

Mike Thompson, Senior Engineering Manager, Actel Corporation.
 

 

"Portable Product Design with Cortex-M1 in Low-power FPGAs."
 

 


The increasing demand for portable products is forcing designers to look for ways to make applications run longer from finite battery resources. This is happening against the backdrop of shrink induced limitations to semiconductor physics resulting in increased leakage and changes to the traditional methods of controlling power consumption. At the same time products are becoming more complex with designers adding more features while dealing with rapidly changing markets and shortened design cycles driving the need for increased flexibility in the system platforms that they are using. By implementing battery powered applications with Flash FPGAs that offer sophisticated low power operating modes, designers can take advantage of the flexibility of programmable logic while developing products that maximize battery life. And, coupled with new state-of-the-art embedded soft processors like ARM’s Cortex-M1 they can meet the increasing demand for performance while maximizing power efficiency. This presentation will look at the implementation of portable applications taking advantage of the capabilities offered by low power Flash FPGAs and the Cortex-M1 processor.

Bio: Mike Thompson is Senior Manager, IP & Applications Solution Marketing at Actel Corp. where he is responsible for the development and infrastructure support of new microprocessor IP cores for use in the company’s FPGAs. He has more than 25 years of experience in both design and support of IP, microprocessors, microcontrollers and the development of embedded applications. He holds a BSEE from Northern Illinois University and an MBA from Santa Clara University. He is currently managing the release of Actel’s optimized version of the ARM Cortex-M1 – the first ARM processor design specifically for implementation in FPGAs.

 

 
 

4:15 - 5:45

Panel

Panel:

“Structured ASICs: Dead or Alive”

 
 

 

EDN

 

Toshiba

 

eASIC

 

InSilica

 

Altera

 

Kenet

 

Faraday

Steve Leibson, Contributing Editor, EDN
 

 


Moderator


Bio: Steve Leibson is an experienced hardware and software design engineer, engineering manager, and design consultant. He spent 10 years working at electronic systems companies including HP’s Desktop Computer Division, Auto-Trol Technology (graphics workstations), and Cadnetix (EDA workstations) after earning his BSEE cum laude from Case Western Reserve University. At HP, Auto-Trol, and Cadnetix, he specialized in the design of desktop computers and workstations, especially in the areas of system and I/O design.  He then spent 15 years as an award-winning technology journalist, publishing more than 200 articles in Microprocessor Report, EDN, EE Times, Electronic News, and the Embedded Developers Journal. He served as Editor in Chief of both EDN and the Microprocessor Report and was the founding Editor in Chief of the Embedded Developers Journal. Leibson has just written and published “Designing SOCs with Configured Cores,” a treatise on 21st-century MPSOC design. Twenty years earlier, he wrote and published “The Handbook of Microcomputer Interfacing,” which was published in English, French, and Dutch, and was used as a university textbook for many years. In 2004, he co-authored “Engineering the Complex SOC” with Tensilica’s president and CEO Chris Rowen, which has also been used as a textbook in university classes. He has also contributed chapters to several other SOC design books since joining Tensilica in 2001.

 

Panelists:

 

1: Soheila Lighvani, Director, Design Engineering, Western Area Design Center, Toshiba America Electronic Components.

2: Jasbinder Bhoot, Senior Director, Marketing, eASIC Corporation.
3: Sunil Baliga, VP & GM, Custom Silicon Business, InSilica.
4: Paul Hollingworth, Senior Director of the HardCopy Product Group, Altera.
5: Phillip LoPresti, CEO & President, Kenet Inc.
6: Chris Moezzi, Vice President of Business Development, Faraday Technology.

 

 
   

Soheila Lighvani, Director, Design Engineering, Toshiba, Western Area Design Center.
 

 

 

Panelist

 

 

 

 

 

 
   

Paul Hollingworth, Senior Director, HardCopy Product Group, Altera Corporation.

 

 

Panelist

 

Paul Hollingworth is the Senior Director of the HardCopy Product Group at Altera. Mr. Hollingworth joined Altera in 1996 as the European Marketing Manager, where he ran the product, corporate and commercial marketing activities for Altera in Europe. Prior to that, Mr. Hollingworth spent 11 years in the ASIC industry, working for LSI Logic in England and Germany in a range of technical and marketing roles, and at Thesys where he was responsible for the Communications Products Group. Mr. Hollingworth received a BSEE in physics and electronics and a Masters in microelectronics from Durham University in England.

 

 
   

Sunil Baliga, VP & GM, Custom Silicon Business, InSilica.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

 

Sunil Baliga currently is the VP & GM of the custom silicon business unit at inSilica Inc. a low-power ASIC supplier focused on 90nm and 65nm designs. He has more than 15 years of experience in marketing semiconductors, primarily in the programmable logic and ASIC markets. Sunil has a B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a M.B.A. from Georgetown University. He also has studied International Business at Oxford University.
 

 

 
   

Jasbinder Bhoot, Senior Director of Marketing, eASIC Corporation.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

 

Jasbinder Bhoot is Senior Director of Marketing at eASIC Corporation. He is responsible for setting the marketing strategy for the company and has overall responsibility for product definition and deployment. Mr. Bhoot has more than 15 years of ASIC and FPGA experience. Prior to joining eASIC, he was part of the vertical marketing team at Xilinx. In this role, he managed the partner solutions team that included IP, design services, EDA, and ASSPs. Mr. Bhoot has also held technical and business management positions at LSI Logic, Altera, Sony Semiconductor, and Texas Instruments. Mr. Bhoot holds a B.S. in electronic engineering from the University of Westminster and an M.B.A. from the University of Nottingham.

 

 

 
   

Phillip LoPresti, CEO & President, Kenet Inc.

 

 

 

Panelist

 

 

Phillip LoPresti, Chief Executive Officer & President. Prior to joining Kenet in 2006, Mr. LoPresti was associate vice president and general manager of the Custom LSI Solutions strategic business unit at NEC Electronics America, where he successfully expanded the company’s ASIC technology business in North America. Mr. LoPresti joined NEC in 1984 as an engineer in the company’s design center and later was promoted to manager. Subsequently he was general manager and then business operations manager of the system LSI organization, where he oversaw all system LSI products and sales. Earlier in his career, Mr. LoPresti was employed by RCA Automated Systems and also was an adjunct professor of electronics at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. He holds bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in electrical
engineering from Boston University.  

 

 
   

Chris Moezzi, Vice President of Business Development, Faraday Technology.

 

 

Panelist

 

 

Christopher Moezzi has 18 years of experience in product management, marketing, and R&D of semiconductor and communication systems. He is responsible for the business development, product planning and marketing of Faraday’s Platform ASICs. Mr. Moezzi was Sr. Director of strategic marketing at GlobespanVirata (Acquired by Connexant) before joining Faraday in 2004. He also held marketing and engineering positions at T-sqware, and Alcatel-Lucent. Moezzi holds an M.B.A. from Northeastern University (Boston, MA) and an M.S.E.E from Southern Methodist University (Dallas, TX).

 

 
 

5:45 – 6:00

Savant

5th International SoC Conference Closing Remarks. Farhad Mafie, President & CEO.  
       

 

 

 

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