electronica settles into automotive, industrial, iot · imperative for wireline communication...
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11/16/2016 EE Times | Electronic Engineering Times | Connecting the Global Electronics Community
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U.S. Analog IP StartupPartners with Megachips
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11|15|2016 MADISON, Wis. — As carmakerslearn more about what highly automatedvehicles can and cannot do, they are no longerdismissing offhand the idea of ...
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11|16|2016 LAKE WALES, Fla. — Local Motors(Phoenix, Arizona) has finally found its niche atthe MEMS Executive Congress 2016(Scottsdale, Arizona). It had already ...
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11|16|2016 In a week when the biennialElectronica trade show in Munich, Germany,was overshadowed by a presidential election onthe other side of the Atlantic Ocean and ...
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11|16|2016 TOKYO — Multicores have beenthe force behind computing for more than adecade. The very idea of gaining speed inprocessing by breaking up problems in ...
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11/16/2016 3:51:46 PM
EELoser Bet it can't go more thana mile with a full load of people.Then what? plug it in and rechargeit for two hours? By the looks of it, itwill be disabled by the first...
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U.S. Analog IP Startup Partners withMegachipsOmni Design offers ultralow power analog IPcores
TOKYO — EE Times has learned that Megachips Corp., Japan’sfabless company focused on ASICs and system integration, hasstruck a deal with Omni Design Technologies (Milpitas, Calif.) todevelop the next generation “analog platform” on which Megachips’customers can build ASICs designed for wired networks includingphone lines, coaxial cables and power lines.
Omni Design is a twoyearold startup founded by prominentanalogy chip experts. At a time when analog components are usingup an increasingly large fraction of system power budget, OmniDesign’s cofounders have set their sights on building highlydifferentiated, ultralow power analog and mixedsignal IP coresprimarily for use in complex SoCs.
The strategic partnership with OmniDesign gives the Japanese ASIC vendora chance to develop an analog module —consisting of highly differentiated, highperformance analogfrontends (AFEs)that can take advantage of Omni Design’shigh speedAnalogtoDigital Converters
(ADCs).
For Omni Design, the deal with Megachips represents the first bigopportunity to strut its highperformance and ultralow powerembedded IP.
Omni Design claims its patented 1014bit ADCs can achievesample rates scalable from Megabits per second to Gigabits persecond while substantially reducing power compared to existingtechnologies.
Masa Konishi, senior general manager, communications productline at Megachips, told EE Times, “We’ve been paying attention towhat Kush’s team of analog experts has been doing over the lastseveral years.
By Kush, Konishi is referring to Omni
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Kush Gulati
By Kush, Konishi is referring to OmniDesign’s CEO Kush Gulati. Gulatifounded in 2007 Cambridge AnalogTechnologies (CAT), which was acquiredby Maxim in 2011.
Although Megachips was never acustomer of CAT or Maxim, Konishi said,“We’ve been toying with the idea oflicensing analog IP from Kush’s team.”
Asked why Megachips has picked Omni Design as its analog IPpartner, Konishi said, “We like the higher performance of their ADC.Their 14bit ADC, for example, can achieve sample rates of1.4Gigabit per second.”
Konishi’s team is focused on the development of products used forhighspeed data communication over wired networks.
Now that the overthetop (OTT) market is dealing increasingly withlarge amounts of data, such as movies streamed via Netflix, it isimperative for wireline communication devices to handle highspeed data, Konishi explained. For such applications, ADCs with10 to 14bit resolution — whose sampling can speed up to multipleGHz — are ideal.
Another reason why Megachips chose Omni Design is “the trackrecord of Kush’s team,” Konish said. “We’ve been following theiradvancements in their ISSCC papers.”
In his view, analog integration is getting tougher, especially whendesigning a complex, highperformance ASIC. “It’s not as if wecould simply drop an offtheshelf ADC into an ASIC.” He said,Megachips’ engineering team “plans to optimize clock, power andnoise so that our analog platform can take full advantage of OmniDesign’s ADCs.”
Technologies Omni Design’s suite of proprietary technologies enables “dramaticreductions in power consumption and significant improvements inthe speed and accuracy of a broad variety of circuits,” according tothe company. Omni Design's CEO Gulati explains that itsfundamental innovation — dubbed SWIFT (Switched CapacitorFault Tolerant Technology) and protected by multiple patents — is“intended to give circuit designers greater performance andincreased flexibility in SoC development.”
Omni Design is currently using this technology “to develop an entirefamily of ADCs from 10 to 14bit resolution, and sampling speedsup to multiple GHz,” Gulati noted.
The company boasts that SWIFT technology is “easily implementedin other signal chain elements such as filters, DACs etc.,”which Gulati believes can revolutionize the design of wirelesstransceivers, for example.
Omni Design has also implemented SWIFT in repeater cores,enabling 10Gbps data transmission over longhaul cables withexceptionally low power consumption and without degradation, thecompany added.
Next page: Allstar analog team
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U.S. Analog IP Startup Partners withMegachips
Allstar analog team Omni Design may not be a household name in the semiconductormarket just yet. But industry cognoscenti are aware of thecompany’s technology and the team’s analog prowess.
For example, Ted Tewksbury, former CEO at IDT, has personallyinvested in Omni Design. Tewksbury described Omni Design as“one of the few semiconductor companies today developingfundamentally new analog design techniques.”
Tewksbury also expressed confidence in Omni Design’s team ofrenowned experts developing ultralow power embedded analog IP.
The members of Omni Design’s allstarteam, aside from the CEO Gulati, includeHaeSeung Lee, Omni Design’s chieftechnologist, who has been a professor inthe department of electrical engineeringand computer science at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology,and Sid Dutta, Omni Design’s vicepresident, who was formally at SiliconLabs leading lowpower analog designactivities in the Sunnyvale design center.Denis Daly, vice president of connected
sensors at Omni Design, who has closely worked with Gulati andProf. Lee over the last six years, has also signed on, along withPavan Hanumolu, Omni Design’s principal technologist, professorat the University of Illinois, an expert in wireline communicationsystems, clock generation and recovery circuits, powermanagement and data conversion.
After Maxim acquired CAT, both Gulati and Lee, cofounders ofCAT, stayed with Maxim for 3.5 years. But by the end of 2014, theyeventually left Maxim and found in March, 2015 their own startuponce again with a focus on the development of analog IP.
Omni Design is a selffunded company, supported by a few angelinvestors like Tewksbury. Although it’s less than two years inbusiness, Gulati noted that his company is expected to “becomeprofitable shortly.” Not often does a startup, especially an IP vendor,get profitable so swiftly.
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Gulati acknowledged that many customers who trusted Gulati’steam since the CAT days are now coming with Omni Design.
He told us, “We’ve been very lucky.” Acknowledging the myriadchallenges still in store, Gulati said, “It’s up to us, and now it’s in ourhands, to scale our business further.”
What’s coming ahead Gulati is betting that big fundamental changes are about to happenin the semiconductor industry.
He predicts that in the next 510 years, SoC vendors will rely moreand more on semiconductor building blocks from thirdparty IPvendors. He said, “Semiconductor IP core companies will become amuch larger part of the semiconductor ecosystem.”
In such an environment, he believes IP companies that will succeedare those who have differentiated technology, turnkey solutions,with plans to “make it easy for its partners to choose and integrateIP into their SoC.”
Although the partnership with Megachips is focused on wiredcommunications applications, Omni Design has developed, inparallel, technology to enable highly differentiated IoT systems. Thecompany claims to have a portfolio of IoT IP, including bandgapreferences with better efficiency and voltage/temperature sensors.The company said that its goal is “to provide ultralow powersolutions for IoT and connected sensors with uncompromisingperformance.”
— Junko Yoshida, Chief International Correspondent, EE Times
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