Viewpoint: Opportunity to win on different design fronts

By Ken Chen, TSMC
powermanagementdesignline.com (June 12, 2009)

Beyond pure process scaling which is necessary to meet today's price, power, and performance goals, chip designers have to grapple with tighter integration and product performance specialities in areas such as integrated power management, image sensing, application-specific data conversion, and enhanced display drivers.

These broader aspects of semiconductor process development may not grab the headlines as often but they are no less important to the long-term success of final products in the market.

When we talk about integration we automatically include computational performance — signal processing and microcontrollers. However the other design fronts I'm also passionate about are the physical interfaces such as sensing, actuating and application-specific drive signals which allow every designer to give an SoC device his competitive edge, his speciality.

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