RS-232 Serial Adapter for Android Devices





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3-D Integration Impact and Challenges

People want transistors—lots of them. It pretty much doesn’t matter what shape they’re in, how small they are, or how fast they operate. Simply said, the more the merrier. Diversity is also good. The more different the transistors, the more useful and interesting the product. And without any question, the cheaper the transistors, the better. So the issue is, how best to achieve as many diverse transistors at the lowest cost possible.

One approach is more chips. Placing a lot of chips close together on a small board will produce a system with many transistors. Another way is more transistors per chip. Keep on scaling the technology to provide more transistors in one or a few chips.

silicon chipThe third option combines these two approaches. Let’s have many chips with many transistors and end up with a huge number of transistors. However, there is a limit to this approach. It’s well understood that scaling is coming to an end. And placing multiple chips on a board can have a terrible effect on a system’s overall speed and power dissipation.

But there is an elegant and intellectually simple solution. Rather than connecting these chips horizontally across a board, connect them vertically, providing N times more transistors, where N is the number of chips stacked one above another. Such vertical, 3-D integration was first broached by William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947. Shockley described the 3-D integration concept in a 1958 patent, which was followed by Merlin Smith and Emanuel Stern’s 1967 patent outlining how best to produce the holes between layers. We now call these inter-layer holes through silicon vias (TSVs). Technology is still catching up to these 3-D concepts.

Three-dimensional integration offers exciting advantages. For example, the vertical distance between layers is much shorter than the horizontal dimensions across a chip. Three-dimensional circuits, therefore, operate faster and dissipate less power than their 2-D equivalent. A 3-D system is shockingly small, permitting it to fit much more conveniently into a tiny space. Think small portable electronics (e.g., credit cards).

But the most exciting advantage of 3-D integration isn’t the small form factor, higher speed, or lower power; it’s the natural ability to support many disparate technologies and functions as one integrated, heterogeneous system. Even better, each chip layer can be optimized for a particular function and technology, since the individual chips can each be developed in isolation. No more trading off different capabilities to combine disparate technologies on the same chip. Now we can use the absolute best technology for each layer and a completely different and optimized technology for a different layer. This approach enables all kinds of novel applications that until now couldn’t have been conceived or would have been cost-prohibitive.

Imagine placing a microprocessor plane below a MEMS-accelerometer plane below an analog plane (with ADCs) below a temperature sensor, all below a video imager (which has to be at the top to “see”). All of these planes fit together into a tiny (smaller than a fingernail) silicon cube while operating at higher speeds and dissipating lower power.

There are technical issues, including: how to best make the TSVs, how to construct the system architecture to fully exploit the system’s 3-D nature, how to deliver power across these multiple planes, how to synchronize this system to best move data around the cube, how to manage system design complexity, and much more.

Two issues rise to the top. The first is power dissipation (specifically, power density). When many transistors switch at a high rate within a tiny volume, the temperature rises, which can impair performance and reliability. I believe this issue, albeit difficult, is technically solvable and simply will require a lot of good engineering.

The real problem is cost. How do we mature this technology quickly enough to drive the costs down to a point where volume commercial applications are possible? Many companies are close to producing tangible 3-D-based products. Cubes of highly dense memory will likely be the first serious and cost-effective product. Early versions are already available. Three-dimensional integration will soon be here in a serious way with what will be a fascinating assortment of all kinds of exciting new products. You won’t have to wait too long.

Evaluating Oscilloscopes (Part 4)





Topic 1: Triggering Methods





Topic 2: External Trigger Input

Topic 3: Arbitrary Waveform Generator





Topic 4: Clock Synchronization




Summary and Closing Comments




Client Profile: ImageCraft Creations, Inc.

CorStarter prototyping board

CorStarter prototyping board

2625 Middlefield Road, #685,
Palo Alto, CA 94306

CONTACT: Richard Man,









DDS Basics (EE Tip #122)

The simplest form of a digital waveform synthesizer is a table look-up generator (see Figure 1). Just program a period of the desired waveform in a digital memory (Why not an EPROM for old timers?), connect a binary counter to the address lines of the memory, connect a DAC to the memory data lines, keep the memory in Read mode, clock the counter with a fixed-frequency oscillator FCLOCK, and voilà, you’ve got a waveform on the DAC output. Don’t forget to add a low-pass filter to clean the output signal, with, as you know, a cut-off frequency a little less than FCLOCK/2 to please Mr. Nyquist.

Figure 1: The most basic digital signal generator is built with a simple binary counter. Its output sequentially addresses the rows of a memory, which holds the successive points of the output signal. It is then converted to an analog signal and filtered.


This design works, but it is not too flexible. If you want to change the output frequency, you need to change the clock frequency, which is not easy to do, especially if you need a fine resolution.

The direct digital synthesizer (DDS) architecture is an improvement on this original design (see Figure 2). Rather than add one to the table look-up address counter at each clock pulse like the counter did in the previous example, a DDS uses an N-bit long-phase register and adds a fixed-phase increment (W) at each clock pulse to this register.

Figure 2: The basic architecture of a DDS is a variant of the counter-based digital generator, but it allows a fine frequency resolution thanks to a phase register and a binary adder. The key point is that the increment is not necessarily a divider of the phase register maximum value.


N can be quite high (e.g., 32 or 48 bits), so only the most significant bits of the phase register are used to select a value from the phase-to-amplitude look-up table, which is usually nothing more than a ROM preprogrammed with a sine waveform. Assume that you are using the P most significant bits as an address. Then the output of the lookup table is routed to a DAC. And, of course, the analog signal finally goes through a low-pass filter, which is called a “reconstruction filter.” You will understand why in a minute.

How does it work? If the phase increment W is set to one, you will need 2N clock pulses to go through all of the values of the look-up table. One sine period will be generated on the FOUT output each 2N clock pulses, exactly like the aforementioned counter-based architecture. If W is 2, it will be twice as fast and the output frequency will be doubled. As you know, you need a little more than two samples per period to be able to reconstruct a sine signal, so the maximum value of W is 2N–1 – 1. The formula giving the output frequency based on the phase increment is then:DDS-EEtip-122-eq1

Don’t be confused. It is not a simple programmable divider because the phase register doesn’t loop back to the same value after each generated period. The table in Figure 3 may help you understand it.

Figure 3: his spreadsheet simulation shows the “phase wheel” concept. A fixed angle is added to the phase register at each clock pulse. Note that each period of the output signal is not identical to the previous ones because the phase doesn’t go back to the same value after a full turn.


What make a DDS a fantastic building block are the numeric examples. Just take a standard, low-performance DDS with a phase register of N = 32 bits and a reference clock FCLOCK = 20 MHz. Your DDS can then generate any frequency from DC to nearly 10 MHz with a resolution of the following:DDS-EEtip-122-eq2

Not bad. In fact, the maximum frequency will be a little lower due to constraints on the low-pass filter.—Robert Lacoste, “Direct Digital Synthesis 101,” Circuit Cellar 217, 2008. The issue is available in the CC Webshop.