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Analog & Power Management

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Quicker to market: New solutions for system design with analog semiconductors

There are two key reasons why the number of analog ICs is continually growing: increased use of sensors and a greater need for power management solutions. This leads to more analog functions in systems and a design that is more complex and sensitive to external influences such as electromagnetic interference or uncontrolled heat propagation.

The semiconductor industry has risen to these challenges with solutions that simplify the complexity of the design of analog applications. One key shift has been to integrate different functional elements into one component. Less complexity at user level means minimized risk of design faults.

The concept of equipping system-on chips (SoC) with more and more analog technology and integrating them into one chip started being put into practice a number of years ago. Nonetheless, it is something that has become increasingly hard to do, as modern semiconductor manufacturing enables the production of ever smaller chips. These days, market-leading chips use 10 or even 7-nanometre technology. These technologies are driven by digital circuits and offer performance/cost optimization for the digital part. For analog circuits, this does not necessarily bring proportional benefits, since they do not scale evenly, the development effort increases disproportionately and reliability is questionable. The semiconductor industry’s answer to this problem is innovative packaging solutions in which several circuits, such as an analog IC and a memory IC, can be combined in a stacked chip. In addition, the semiconductor industry also offers new design tools and methods to make the design processes for analog circuits in digitally-based nodes more competitive.

As well as the development of integrated solutions, the semiconductor industry offers analog ICs in ever smaller housings. You can already buy operational amplifiers that have an area of merely 0.64 mm². As a result, engineers can reduce both the dimensions and costs of their systems and simultaneously maintain a high performance level in IoT applications, personal electronics devices and industrial applications.

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BCD – A Key Technology for Power ICs

BCD technology combines the strengths of three different types of process technologies in a single chip: bipolar for precise analog functions, CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) for digital design and DMOS (Double Diffused Metal Oxide Semiconductor) for power and high-voltage elements. This combination has a number of advantages: greater reliability, lower electromagnetic interference and a smaller chip area. This technology gives chip designers a flexible and reliable way of combining power, analog and digital signal processing. BCD supports a wide range of applications in the areas of energy management, analog data acquisition and power actuators.

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Beyond-the-Rails – now only one power rail

Thanks to Beyond-the-Rails technology, the circuit board now only needs one power rail and several power supply components can be dispensed with entirely. This substantially reduces the number of components and means that much less space is needed on the circuit board, which in turn significantly simplifies the analog design. Integrated circuits that are equipped with Beyond-the-Rails technology can process incoming signals that are larger than the supply voltage and smaller than ground. Furthermore, Beyond-the-Rails products that have an analog output can provide signals that are larger than the supply voltage and smaller than ground.

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MEMS plus analog technology as an integrated solution

MEMS – Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems – are tiny components that marry logic elements and micro-mechanical structures in one chip. They have become indispensable in many industries, including sensor technology. These integrated systems are made up of three building blocks: firstly, the sensor element itself – the eponymous microelectromechanical system. Secondly, the ASIC, which contains the analog circuits, including the amplifier levels and the power management for example. These parts are integrated into the third building block: the housing. The housing protects the component and shields it against influences from the surroundings (e.g. electromagnetic interference (EMI)).

As system-in-package solutions, they offer the designer a solution that, in comparison to discrete systems, consumes less energy, is more reliable and has a smaller form factor. They can measure a wide range of variables, including acceleration, angular velocity and sound. The latest generation of analog MEMS microphones combines highly-effective audio signal processing with lower electricity consumption. Due to their low inherent noise, they are particularly ideal for producing high-quality audio recordings as needed, for example, in conference systems, cameras and audio recorders.

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Microcontrollers with Integrated Peripheral Devices

A lot of devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) rely on analog circuits in order to prepare sensor signals or manage power supply, for example. However, designing these devices can be a challenge, since achieving the required functions is not so easy when the cost and space specifications are tight. Microcontrollers that already contain analog peripherals, such as analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) or comparators, or even a full set of analog peripherals needed to design DCDC converters or motor drivers, present a welcome solution to this conundrum.

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Microcontrollers (MCU) with on-chip ADCs not only spare developers the cost of a separate ADC and require less space on the circuit board layout, they also reduce development time for software and hardware. Another advantage is that they increase the flexibility of the system, as the ADC has a connection to the central processor unit (CPU) and, thus, can directly interact with other resources on the microcontroller. MCUs with integrated analog peripherals also come up trumps in terms of energy consumption: the CPU can be put into standby mode while the integrated analog circuit continues working with its own clock source. The analog component only wakes up the CPU when required, thus effectively reducing the energy consumption of the entire system.

The right packaging

Semiconductor packaging is playing an increasingly vital role in solving the conflict between the need for ever smaller, faster and reliable chips and the need for high performance, improved energy efficiency and low costs. There are a number of different types of device housing: what they have in common is that they encapsulate integrated circuits, providing electrical connectivity of the integrated circuit as well as protection and conduction of heat built up in silicone. It is important to decide on the best type of housing as early as the initial design stages. This is the only way to ensure that the devices meet the requirements.

Designers are focusing on devising ever-smaller housings that can accommodate more power yet simultaneously protect the delicate circuits. The challenge of this miniaturization process is how to increase the power density when there is less space available. This also increases the thermal requirements that the packaging has to meet – the packaging being crucial to the chip’s ability to withstand thermal loads.

Integrating several chips together with components such as inductors, capacitors and sensors in a single housing enables the total size of the components to be reduced, lowers system costs, improves the speed and efficiency of the circuits and increases the reliability of the system.

It is only since the development and availability of these tiny integrated circuits that engineers have been able to design increasingly smaller devices, such as tiny wearable electronics for patient monitoring, miniature microphones for speech-based systems and tiny earphones with ultra-small temperature sensors.

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Analog & Power Management

The era of digitalisation is ever advancing, almost as if our world were solely represented and controlled by ones and zeros. Every physical variable – be it an audio signal, temperature, voltage – is an analog value.

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Lower Energy Consumption

New technologies are helping to considerably reduce the energy consumption of analog chips, which results in extended battery life and easier integration.

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Helpful Design Tools

Design sheets, reference designs, evaluation tools and simulation solutions all serve to successfully streamline the design process.

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Why the Digital World Needs Analog Semiconductors?

Analog semiconductor components are important technological precursors, as they enable many state-of-the art digital devices to be developed in the first place.