The Hindu : `Modem-on-a-chip' by Indian team

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, May 30, 2003

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`Modem-on-a-chip' by Indian team

By Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore May 29. 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).

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