Design Ideas

Two chips simplify layout for high-end embedded control

If you are considering using one of the 32- or 64-bit RISC µPs from Integrated Device Technology (IDT), the company’s new RC32134 and RC64145 system-controller ICs (Picture) can make your job easier. The chips provide synchronous-DRAM, memory, and I/O control; a PCI interface; and peripherals, including UARTs, timers, and interrupt controllers. The 32134 for the RC32364 µP provides a glueless interface to DRAM and a 32-bit, 33-MHz PCI function. The 64-bit part supports a number of IDT’s 64-bit RISC µPs and provides a 32-bit, 66-MHz PCI function for higher bandwidth. The company claims the products speed development of complex applications and use less board area. The company plans to combine the same functional blocks into single-chip controllers.—by Graham Prophet

Integrated Device Technology, Leatherhead, UK. +44 1372 366110, www.idt.com .

Silicon breeds a new round of design tools

As more IC designs move to 0.25-µm technology, EDA-tool vendors are responding with new software. New to Europe is Simplex Solutions; Simplex’s tools let you perform full-chip extraction of parasitics and analysis of signal-integrity and power characteristics. Version 2.0 of the VoltageStorm tool provides a three-times increase of static and dynamic full-chip analysis of power-grid effects on a chip layout compared with the previous version. For 0.25-µm and smaller processes, you must perform power-grid sign-off alongside conventional design-rule checks and layout/schematic checks, the company says. Designs that may be functionally correct may work unreliably or not at all because of excessive IR drop in the power grid on the chip. A 10% drop from IR losses may mean a 30% variance in delay, causing the design to exceed timing margins. Block-wise power estimation may miss dynamic effects in the grid on the physical layout. With VoltageStorm, you first extract distributed resistance and capacitance and then use simulation vectors to examine effects in critical areas: It takes only a relatively small vector set to reveal problems. A partner tool, ClockStorm, identifies timing problems. You can also run an analysis for electromigration effects to eliminate the chance of premature failure of the chip in the field. This analysis becomes especially relevant with designs operating faster than 300 MHz, Simplex says.

Meanwhile, adding to the tool sets you can choose from to support design reuse are introductions from Sagantec. The Encore graphical user interface helps you manage hard-intellectual-property migration from one technology to another. One of the tools it manages is the new Hurricane migration tool that automates moving a laid-out design to a new silicon technology; it manipulates polygon data, transferring geometry into a new set of process rules and compacting the layout until the design is about to violate the rules. You can use the tool on 0.18-µm and smaller geometries at a claimed speed of 25,000 transistors per hour. You will also be able to use forthcoming releases of the tool set with some analogue designs, Sagantec says. Analogue designs are more difficult because the tool must account for factors such as proximity and symmetry of geometric features, but the company believes that Hurricane can handle these tasks for many analogue designs.

Dealing more with physical chip design than its previous tools have done is Synopsys with its Chip Architect product. The company describes the tool as a design planner for system-on-chip design. It continues Synopsys’ trend toward giving tools access early in the design flow to physical information through more accurate estimation of layout effects. Synopsys calls the process “physical synthesis,” distinct from and before the place-and-route phase. By progressively refining the estimation of physical effects through the top-down design flow, you get more routable placements and more reliable “timing closure,” meaning meeting timing margins and targets when the layout is complete.—by Graham Prophet

Simplex, Abingdon, UK. +44 1235 863132, www.simplex.com .

Sagantec, Eindhoven, Netherlands. +31 40 2973 773, www.sagantec.com .

Synopsys, Reading, UK. +44 118 931 3822, www.synopsys.com .

Small mezzanine-board format offers more I/O

You can now get both modules and carrier boards for the PC-MIP mezzanine format. MEN and SBS-Greenspring (now called SBS Technologies) developed the format as a smaller alternative to PMC modules and lets you put six PCI-based modules on any CompactPCI, PCI, or VME motherboards. Motorola sponsors the format, and about 20 companies now support it. PC-MIP uses an unaltered PCI bus and the same connectors as PMC but in a layout measuring 47X90 mm.

MEN has announced 12 modules for a range of I/O functions, including Ethernet, graphics, SCSI, Profibus, and controller-area networks. SBS Technologies offers the P-HSS2-II, a serial-I/O board that provides twin RS-232C or RS-422 channels for networking or telecomm applications. The hardware/software offering has drivers for Windows NT or VxWorks. Motorola offers the MVME2100, a VME carrier board with an MPC8240 processor and a mix of PC-MIP and PMC expansion sites. The board comes with 32 or 64 Mbytes of synchronous DRAM and 5 or 9 Mbytes of flash memory. It targets high-performance but cost-sensitive applications. Using both sites on a single motherboard, you can access a range of PMC modules. You can get more information on the new format from www.vita.com and www.mezzanines.com. —by Graham Prophet

MEN Mikro, Nurnberg, Germany. +49 911 99 33 50, www.men.de .

SBS Technologies, Menlo Park, CA. +1 650 327 1000, www.sbs-greenspring.com .

Motorola Computer Group, Maidenhead, UK. +44 1628 763297, www.mcg.mot.com .

Double your DSP cores for GSM base-station processors

Lucent Technologies’ DSP16410 provides 800 million multiply/accumulate (MAC) operations per sec, letting designers of baseband processors for Global Systems for Mobile communications (GSM) and other cellular-standard base stations pack more channel processing into an equivalent pc-board area with low power consumption. The latest in Lucent’s 16-bit, fixed-point DSP 16000 series, the 16410 has two DSP 16000 cores, each having two MAC units; single-cycle MAC operation, and a 200-MHz clock.

The company estimates power demand of 380 mW. This power budget lets you run 29 enhanced-full-rate GSM speech coders. To avoid data bottlenecks with the increased processing power, the chip has a DMA controller that gives you peripheral-to-memory and memory-to-memory transfers that are transparent to the DSP core; the DMA controller has access to a block of 3 Mbits of 192k-bit, 16-bit-word SRAM on the chip. An interprocessor communications channel between the two DSP cores lets you synchronize operation.

Peripherals include two serial ports that can be connected to T1/E1 lines (that also have hardware A-law- and µ-law-companding support) and a parallel, 16-bit, host-interface unit; all of these connect to the chip via the DMA controller. The high-speed internal bus goes to a 32-bit, external-memory bus that can take advantage of low-latency external SRAM.

Lucent builds the chip in a 0.16-µm process and packages it in a 208-ball package with 0.8-mm ball pitch and 15X15-mm external dimensions. With less than 400-mW power consumption, the device requires no heat sinking. Price is $80 (10,000).—by Graham Prophet

RTOS vendors move to support automotive standard

The Tornado for Automotive tool suite from Wind River (Picture) supports the OSEK automotive operating system initiative. Tornado includes MotorWorks, an OSEK-compliant RTOS that the company acquired through its partnership with German software house 3Soft, and a fully integrated tool suite. The OSEK automotive-industry initiative defines a scalable operating system for resource-limited systems. With an OSEK-compliant system, you can assemble the minimum OS kernel you need for simple functions such as those in car-body systems. The environment runs on Windows 95, 98, and NT and includes compilation, debugging, and OS-configuration tools. The configuration tool builds the kernel for an application and has the same application-programming interface and third-party-tool links as other Tornado family members.

Also venturing into the OSEK domain is Integrated Systems with pOSEK; you can also consider the scalable system for applications that are similarly resource-constrained, such as communications, office automation, and consumer products. If you use a proprietary OS for a high-volume applications for efficiency reasons, an OSEK-compliant OS might be a viable alternative.—by Graham Prophet

Wind River Systems, Swindon, UK. +44 1793 831831, www.wrs.com .