Trends and Challenges in Wireless SOC Design

The design, verification and bring-up of wireless SOCs is one of the biggest challenges in the semiconductor industry. Despite the progress in semiconductor technology the pressure in this segment still further increases:

• Wireless markets develop heterogeneously in Europe, the US and emerging markets forcing us to squeeze more and more functionality on a single base-band processor.
• The demand on mobile data rates and spectral efficiency is still increasing, asking for very elaborate signal processing.
• The decreasing technology nodes fail to meet the additional demand on functionality and further aggravate some power consumption and reliability problems.

To meet these requirements the usage of highly customized architectures with complex HW / SW interaction is mandatory. Combined with the further increased functional complexity we now face a situation where no longer the HW design but the system-level verification and system bring-up are the biggest challenge.

The talk will detail these industry trends, and show how they impact architectures and system design. Focus will be on the tremendous verification challenge and on strategies to meet it.
 

About the speaker:

Michael Speth graduated from RWTH-Aachen in 1995. From 1995 he was with the Institute for Integrated System (ISS) at the RWTH-Aachen and received his Ph.D. in 2000. Between 2000-2011 he worked for Infineon Technologies as systems engineer for 3G and 4G baseband architectures.

In 2011 he joined Intel technologies as part of an acquisition. At Intel he currently leads a team for algorithm and architecture innovations and is responsible for 3G modem concepts.