Author: Anand Parthasarathy
Publication: The Hindu
Date: May 30, 2003
URL: http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/2003/05/30/stories/2003053004651200.htm
Engineers at Texas Instruments'
Bangalore-based development centre have delivered the world's first single-chip
solution for high-speed modems used for broadband communication applications.
The system-on-a-chip (SOC) brings
together on a single slab of silicon all the electronics, both analogue
and digital, that drives modems harnessing the latest versions of Asynchronous
Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL): technology which will drive tomorrow's
bandwidth-hungry home and office applications such as audio and streaming
video.
In a briefing today for The Hindu,
Vivek Pawar, General Manager of TI's Broadband Silicon Technology Centre
characterised as the "biggest challenge", the Indian engineers' successful
realisation on the same chip of both analogue and digital circuits - a
confluence of technologies which has led to the chip's christening as "Sangam".
Over 70 hardware experts worked
for one year to develop the chip which was expected to bring down by at
least 25 per cent the cost at which ADSL modem-makers could deliver future
models, he added.
The ADSL connections, first introduced
in India by Dishnet for Internet access, today could send and receive chunks
of data 20 million times a second (20 megabits per second) and modems with
the new TI chips under the hood had realised these speeds, Mr. Pawar said.
Suresh Kumar, who led the design
and development team for Sangam, said that the matchbox sized silicon slab
contained over 10 million transistors on board and combined five sub-systems
that made up the modem electronics: the analogue and digital circuits;
the communication processor and the drivers which sent and received the
packets of data.
However, according to team members
Diptendra Basu and Krishnan Ramabadran, one of the biggest challenges was
to incorporate on the same chip, the system which did "power management"
- handled the multiple voltages and currents required by different devices.
Equally demanding, said Satish Kulkarni, was the task of ensuring that
the digital "noise" did not interfere with the complex analogue building
blocks.
Once the "made in India" design
was validated, wafers containing hundreds of units of Sangam were fabricated
at TI's silicon foundry's abroad to the latest 130 nanometre technology:
this means devices etched on the silicon were about ten millionth of a
centimetre apart. The chip, said to be the most complex undertaken by TI's
India centre till date, will shortly become available worldwide.
The Bangalore-based development
teams have earlier developed an advanced digital signal processor (Ankoor),
an audio processor (Malhar) and a media chip (Zeno).
