Read the Electronics Weekly guide to the International Solid State Circuits Conference.
At the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) Texas Instruments has drawn its first roadmap for a 45nm mobile baseband processor which will address what it called the power challenges of 3.5G wireless designs.
TI’s 45nm process incorporates power and performance optimisation technologies which it claimed would “realise a 55 per cent performance increase and 63 per cent power reduction versus the 65nm process”.
The process is designed to address the specific needs of the portable device market, initially mobile handsets, which uses immersion lithography tools and ultra-low K dielectrics to double the number of chips produced on each silicon wafer.
Strained silicon is used to further reduce leakage in the 45nm process.
Dr. Uming Ko, TI Senior Fellow and director of TI’s Wireless Chip Technology Center, described the new device in a paper at ISSCC this week.
This first 45nm wireless chip integrates hundreds of millions of transistors in a 12x12mm package.
There is a multimedia applications engine based on an ARM11, a TMS320C55x digital signal processor (DSP) and a separate image signal processor.
Analogue elements such as an RF Codec are also integrated in the device.