( ESNUG 588 Item 25 ) --------------------------------------------- [10/30/20]
Subject: Mo on Movellus customizable PLLs/DLLs are Netflix, not Blockbuster
Virtual DAC'20 Troublemakers Panel
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Editor's Note: If you missed my 2019 panel, Movellus automatically
generates all-digital PLLs & DLLs. (Pic below) - John
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Cooley: Mo, you claim you can do this analog/digital, PLL/DLL thing and
it's really nice, and the academics probably like that, but is
anyone actually buying this thing?
And I can already get this same PLL/DLL stuff from TCI or
Silicon Creations and I know that it works. Why should
I even talk to you Movellus guys?
Mo: Well it's a good thing for us our customers like it as well.
And there's a lot of them.
Those companies [TCI and Silicon Creations] have good PLL/DLL
IP portfolios -- there's no denying that.
But one thing that's happening fundamentally is a mindset shift;
off-the-shelf movies were great for Blockbuster, but we're
actually living in Netflix world.
It kind of goes with the mindset discussion that is already the
undertone of the cloud business model.
The same thing needs to happen to IP -- in particular, with
analog IP [PLLs/DLLs] which often can be the deciding factor
for picking a certain fab process or not.
So, there are many reasons why customers are going with us
vs. the existing PLL/DLL solutions.
One customer is in a satellite application space -- where they
were limited by the offering you know what a certain process
has in terms of IP offering.
They came to us because our digital PLL's were able to solve
that problem. So, these users were not limited by the
off-the-shelf IP the fab had (which is limited.)
There's a lot of new markets like that popping up.
Another thing -- we allow our PLL/DLL customers to go into
some of the extreme operating ranges -- really low voltages,
and wide dynamic voltage and frequency scaling which is
becoming increasingly important in high performance SoCs.
We enabled one customer to go from 0.5 Volts all the way up
to 1 Volt dynamic voltage scaling in a 7 nanometer SoC,
with over 1 billion transistors.
You can't do those kinds of things with off-the-shelf or
traditional analog PLL/DLL's.
Cooley: They actually wanted to shift it? They actually wanted to scale
actively as it's being used?
Mo: Yeah exactly. The entire voltage of the entire SoC, including
the analog IPs that are sprinkled around, they needed to shift in
that range.
Cooley: TCI and Silicon Creations don't have anything that works in those
ranges? I mean you'd think they would have that.
Mo: They don't. This is why customers come to us. It's a
fundamental thing like if you're putting an op amp in your
circuit, you must bias it in saturation, and you must have a
certain voltage.
And you're stuck. You put a limit on your supply voltage range.
So those are the things that don't apply to us. One could argue,
"Oh that's great, but what about older nodes?". Like what I
just described is maybe only good for advanced nodes...
But what's happening, very interestingly, is maybe you go to
40nm, and you have 100 PLLs that have been developed over the
years -- but those were developed for different markets. So
today people want IoT, they want Edge AI, they want analog
in-memory compute.
Those have different performance requirements.
So even older nodes with lots of PLL/DLL selection are still
running into limitations. And these are the problems we
[Movellus] are able to solve.
To answer your question, it's a mindset shift from off-the-shelf
a Blockbuster mindset to a Netflix mindset -- but for
analog IP -- and therefore enabling our PLL/DLL customers to do
a lot of fun things with it.
Cooley: Ok, cool.
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