Why it Makes Great Sense to Combine RF, High Speed, and Fabrication Expertise into a Design Center of Innovation
(Room 203)
17 Oct 18
1:45 PM
-
2:15 PM
Tracks:
RF & MW Design/Workflow
Why did we decide to put our RF, high-speed circuit, and fabrication expertise together under one roof in Benchmark’s RF and High Speed Design Center of Innovation? In the past forty years, RF, baseband, and high-speed compute were all discrete boxes and functions on separate boards and modules. There was not the push for integration and miniaturization that we are starting to see today. Conventional technology no longer gets customers where they need to be on their product roadmap. There is no more room for these functions to be discrete anymore, and the different disciplines are coming together to expand the limitations of what is possible. The trends of the past ten years show that the heavy lifting in electronics shifted from hardware to software. That is now going asymptotic. There is only so much further software can go. The semiconductor industry is not improving at a rate of Moore’s Law anymore. Things are getting so small that there is no longer a doubling effect. It is time for hardware designers to do some heavy lifting again, so the industry can continue to make technological progress. Benchmark’s plan is to reimagine the whole foundation of electronic circuits. If you really look at conventional circuit traces, they are good up to about 10 GHz, and then their performance starts to fall off, both in high-speed digital and RF. In order to fix this problem, we needed to be able to create very high aspect ratio traces. When we say “high aspect ratio” we mean a trace about as tall as it is wide. We have invested in technology and equipment to create these high aspect ratio circuits, plus we offer a lower loss substrate base material (liquid crystal polymer - LCP). LCP has superior power handling ability and has roughly half the loss of a polyimide, making it a great choice for a HDI board material. Both RF and digital applications have loss issues. Loss translates into burning up power for the customer, and power generates heat. Our goal is to reduce loss to improve thermal management and overall system efficiency. We believe today’s DFx (design for excellence) is inherently limiting to the designer. Whether you are in the RF or digital world, if you make electronics, we know you have SWaP problems. (Size, Weight and Power). We now can give you better performance and a more reliable design. With our new multi-capacity design center, we take a holistic approach to how hardware is brought together. What are the materials? What are the best pieces in each of these areas? When we bring these pieces together, how can we solve problems in new ways? Our team is in the problem solving business – we are not tied to a specific technology. We specialize in the art of the possible - unique approaches to solving challenging hardware problems.