Engineering Scrapbook

Best Paper Award

 March 2010

Advanced Simulation Project

Information about our chips (all public)

 TweakTown 

Image Sensor

Report

Specifications 4000x3000

12 Megapixel
Back Side Illumination
    1.1 micron pixel
Clk = 6 to 48 Mhz
10-bit ADC
4-lane MIPI
6.8mm x 6.42mm die size  
-30C to 70C 

 AnandTech report
of a new kind of
Image Sensor
Specifications
4208 x 3120
13-Megapixel
Back-side Illumination
1.1 micron pixel
6 to 48 Mhz
10-bit ADC
4-lane MIPI
6.78 x 5.89 mm die size
-30C to 70C
optical format = 1/3 inch 

 A ChipWorks
Teardown
of a Chip (K46B)

Lower Right: An ISA board ("Smart Elf") with 4 Xilinx FPGA's that emulates a variety of I/O protocols found in LaserJet Printers (Disk I/O, Engine, Front Panel).  The connector accommodates a single-board CPU which controls the emulator

Underneath: An older generation board.  My contribution was adding the CPU, which allowed the board size to shrink by 50%.  Also, boards could be re-used across products, which eliminated most of the lead time, engineering effort, and allowed for more flexibility in allocating resources.

RTL Coding of Emulator functions, FPGA Synthesis, Board Design, Software Design (C + Assembler)

ISA-Based I/O Emulator Board

A later version of the same board.

We replaced the socketed parts with in-board programmable FPGA's - we could now retarget new products without even removing the FPGA's.

We switched to Altera because their Max-Plus software was easier to use.  We switched from through-hole to SMT.

RTL Coding, FPGA Emulator Design, Board Design, Software Design (C + Assembler)

4-Port Parallel Output Card

A special project for printer testing.  Stuff eight boards into a PC and control 32 printers with one computer.

RTL Coding, FPGA Synthesis, Board Design, Software  Design (C + Assembler)

 PCI Emulator

PCI Emulator: I took this over when the original engineer left.  This acted like a PCI card when plugged into a PCI slot. 

Why not use an actual PCI card? 

We could program this one to look like any size card, or to have different timing profiles.  We could also record transactions sent to the card so if a single line was failing, we could identify it.

Re-synthesis to meet new product demands, Coordination of board production

This was my 130 Mhz Second Order Sigma-Delta ADC in UMC 0.18u for baseband cell-phone chipset project. Installed and setup UMC 0.18u CDK for group. Designed block with Cadence COMPOSER, simulated in Cadence ANALOG ARTIST with SPECTRE, worked with layout technician to realize design in Cadence VIRTUOSO. Designed related FIR filter in Verilog, simulated under MODELSIM, synthesized for VST 0.18u UMC library in Synopsys DESIGN COMPILER. The test chip worked first time. SNR was 60 db, power consumption was 2 mA. Final design size was 800u x 200u. Measured performance matched Spice simulations, and provided 10+ bits of resolution in a poorly controlled digital process.

XRF equipment measures concentrations of various elements (lead, sulfur, iron) in environmental samples taken from air sampling systems.  The company, Nuclear Environmental Analysis, designed equipment for its in-house use for specific analysis contracts, and also sold chemical analysis and environmental sampling equipment.

At the time, this was probably the fastest and highest capacity XRF system in the world.  Most systems could handle 30 or 40 samples - our cassettes could get loaded with 80 samples, so you could run them all night without making someone stay at work to re-load them.

IBM in Menlo Park, CA.   This was their PC Storyboard Product, a predecessor to Microsoft SharePoint.

Mostly I wrote 24-bit RGB image code with blends, 2D projections, dissolves, and transforms.  Also some print dithering drivers which let us print half-way decent photos with the primitive inkjet printers of the day.

Paul Alivisatos' lab at UC Berkeley, which studies quantum nanostructures.   This project was with Vicki Colvin, who is now at Rice University, on equipment to study the Stark Effect (change in the absorption spectra of molecules when they are exposed to a high electric field).  We had to control the high voltage field and then analyze the data - C program, User's Guide, and a set of C utilities (follow links to see the code)