Analog IP vendor Gain becomes fabless chip supplier

Analog IP vendor Gain becomes fabless chip supplier
By Stephan Ohr, EE Times
February 22, 2002 (12:36 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020222S0037

SAN FRANCISCO — Gain Technology will announce its entry into the commercial-products arena next week at the Intel Developer Forum. After seven years as a seller of analog design expertise and intellectual property (IP), the Tucson, Ariz.-based company will begin to market packaged ICs for high-speed serial communications.

Its first commercial products, to be announced at IDF, will be a physical-layer transceiver (the GT3200) for USB 2.0 implementations. In addition to that 480-Mbit/second interface, Gain intends to deliver products over the next 12 to 18 months that will address Serial ATA (15 to 600 Mbits/s), Infiniband (3.125 Gbits/s), 3GIO and other PHY technologies targeted at next-generation PCs, servers, storage cabinets and peripherals.

The packaging and marketing of standard products seems a natural extension of Gain's communication IC expertise, said Steve Millaway, the company's founder and chief executive officer Millaway had designed high-speed op amps for Burr-Brown more than 10 years ago and had applied that expertise in the years since to 300 analog IC designs for customers as diverse as Maxim, Agere, Intel and LSI Logic. Self-funded from the start, Gain Technology was formally founded in 1994 and now has 60 employees.

Even manufacturers with broad system-on-chip (SoC) integration expertise, Millaway discovered, tap analog design teams to formulate the I/O. The 0.18-micron process has become mainstream, but 0.13 micron is ramping quickly, he said. While shrinking digital CMOS is less friendly to analog design (because of low-voltage issues and digital noise generated by fast clocks), ASIC designers often stumble when it comes to maintaining signal-level compatibility with legacy systems, he said.

"When the price of a mask set starts approaching $1 million, you can't afford an I/O mistake," said David Brenner, Gain Technology's director of marketing.

But Gain's decision to market its own packaged ICs comes in res ponse to a trend — even among semiconductor manufacturers with their own fabs — to use foundry technology wherever possible, Millaway said. "Many customers have asked us to redesign existing products so that they could be fabricated on a TSMC or UMC process," he said. Tapping those foundries to become a fabless chip company seemed an obvious choice.

Gain's GT3200 is the first in a family of high-speed analog physical-layer ICs for networking, computing, consumer electronics and embedded-system applications, said Brenner. The GT3200 is a complete analog front-end interface; it follows the USB 2.0 Transceiver Macrocell Interface (UTMI) specification in partitioning the digital and analog portions of a system. It comes in a 64-lead quad flat pack. Evaluation boards are now available.

True to its roots, Gain also offers a complementary USB 2.0 IP macrocell (the GT3100 ), which can be integrated with ASICs and SoCs. The core is available on a variety of foundry processes, including those of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and United Microelectronics Corp.

More Intel Developer Forum coverage.