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TECHNOLOGY Q&A
Larry Morrell, VP and General Manager of Impinj’s IP Products Group, answers important questions pertaining to Logic NVM.
1) Lack of logic NVM awareness in the SoC design community was a key theme in this year’s Logic NVM event. If you had to pick one or two key applications you think will put logic NVM “on the map” for the average SoC designer who may not be aware of the technology, what would they be?
There are some obvious high volume examples that have not been well publicized. First is RF and in particular, RFID. Hundreds of millions of RFID chips from several suppliers have shipped to customers using a new UHF standard called Gen 2. The overwhelming majority of those chips are using Logic NVM. The second one is display drivers for handheld devices. Again, hundreds of millions of devices are in use today and are using Logic NVM as a mechanism for trimming the display for uniformity. The fastest growing usage is in trim and calibration for analog functions. This area includes end chip products in timing, power management, and ADC/DAC trimming.
2) You’ve helped bring other technologies from a nascent form to common toolbox component. Where do you think we are in the cycle with Logic NVM, and what might accelerate the process?
New technologies go through a predicable series of stages that get named variously as emerging, early adopter, mainstream adoption, and maturity. Logic NVM is still in the early adopter stage, but is in the process of creeping up on mainstream adoption. During this phase, there is typically some industry shakeout: new companies jump in, established companies with marginal technology drop out, others may merge to form stronger companies, and so forth. When you start to see former competitors becoming partners or merging, you know you are in the mainstream adoption stage. Logic NVM is almost there.
3) Other than user awareness education, what are the most important drivers behind the future growth of Logic NVM adoptions?
Simply put: Success. As companies who AREN’T using Logic NVM see their competitors gain an advantage by using it—the growth will really accelerate. That growth is already starting to happen in certain segments where intense competition has driven companies to dig out every last advantage. Examples are: DRM-capable flash controllers and smart power management chips. NVM is a must and going off-chip is just not practical. One choice is embedded flash in the controller, but that limits the processes available to the older technologies and therefore limits the functions you can fit on the controller—wrong answer. In power management, having the ability to set calibration and configurations into the chip and keep them there is a requirement—being able to do that post manufacturing is now a necessary feature.
4) How is the market different for Logic NVM suppliers compared to suppliers of other types of semiconductor IP?
Logic NVM is in the “hard IP” category. Yes, it is “hard to design,” but in this sense, “hard IP” means that it is delivered to the customer in fixed GDS II format rather than any synthesizable form as is most other IP. In addition, this technology uses non-standard features in a standard logic CMOS process. Non-standard in the sense that NVM takes advantage of the features of the process that “normal” digital designers do not use. Logic NVM really takes the CMOS process to its “logical extreme.” That fact makes the characterization and qualification of the IP much more important. It really must be thoroughly tested and verified across process corners to be sure there are no surprises.
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Impinj's innovative IP products, core to the company's RFID tags, are licensed to leading semiconductor companies worldwide, allowing them to seamlessly integrate crucial nonvolatile memory (NVM) alongside analog and digital functionality on a single chip. Impinj's IP products include the popular AEON® family of embeddable cores, which provides rewriteable NVM technology in logic CMOS manufacturing. For more information, visit www.impinj.com.
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Larry Morrell is a semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) and system-on-chip (SoC) design expert with more than 20 years of semiconductor industry experience with early-stage and established companies. Involved in many semiconductor industry innovations such as the launch of field programmable gate array (FPGA) methodologies and the first USB chips, Mr. Morrell was a founding member of the international standards body and trade association, PCMCIA (Personal Computer Memory Card International Association) and is a champion of logic nonvolatile memory SIP market initiatives. He earned a B.S. in Computer and Electrical Engineering and a B.A. in Russian Languages from New Mexico State University.
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