SoC slam dunk still slightly out of reach

In contrast, Chris Mangelsdorf, design center director at Analog Devices Inc. (Tokyo), warned against timidity. "Integration always wins," he stated. If a company set out to implement a multichip module solution, a competitor that pursued a single-chip solution would succeed and win, he said.

Robert Mertens, senior vice president at IMEC (Leuven, Belgium), a research consortium, offered the contrasting view that differences in process and environment would keep different functions — power, RF and digital baseband, for instance — on different substrates. But that would lead to the rapid development of very dense stacked packaging that would make combinations of dice nearly monolithic. Mertens cited interconnect, testing and thermal/mechanical issues as problems to be solved.

Texas Instruments Inc. vice president Dennis Buss, Intel Corp. technology development director Greg Atwood, and Stanford University department chairman Bruce Wooley concluded the discussion by pretty much ag reeing with each other that technical and practical issues would nearly always place the optimum design — by nearly any combination of criteria — somewhere on the continuum between a handful of small chips and a single large multitechnology SoC. All three were certain about continued advances in integration, but all three pointed the accusing finger at analog and power circuits as long-term holdouts.