Create Custom “Housekeeping” Chips To Consolidate Functions

Design Solution: Create Custom “Housekeeping” Chips To Consolidate Functions

Successive generations of portable consumer products create new headaches for system and chip designers as speed, functionality, and I/O functionality escalate. Moore’s Law continues to meet the required jumps in digital processing capability. Added peripheral and memory functionality often requires a corresponding increase in system components, though, increasing the size, mechanical complexity, weight, and power requirements across the system, raising costs and reducing margins. To counter this trend, it’s necessary to improve the integration level in the product. But there’s a catch. How technically advanced or how easy a semiconductor process used to implement this integration makes it for the system designer doesn’t matter if the resulting product is too expensive to sell to the end customer or if the end product is introduced to the customer too late for the market w...

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