Progress Claimed on CMOS Crash-Avoidance Chip
Staff -- Semiconductor International, 1/29/2008
Researchers at the University of Florida (Gainesville, Fla.) and the Semiconductor Research Corp. (SRC, Research Triangle Park, N.C.) said that they are on the road to developing an automotive collision-avoidance radar IC built in CMOS rather than more-costly gallium arsenide (GaAs) or indium phosphide (InP) technologies.
Moving to CMOS could reduce the cost of collision-avoidance radars from hundreds of dollars to ~$10 each.
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| Ken O, professor, University of Florida |
“The chip industry’s manufacturers will be able to drive the cost down on a well-established CMOS platform,” said Ken O, lead researcher at the University of Florida, who led a team including students Ning Zhang, Shashank Nallani and Changhua Cao.
They recently demonstrated the first CMOS low-noise amplifier and a 50 GHz sine wave generator that uses a phase-locked loop to stabilize the oscillation frequency. The circuits can be fabricated in readily available 130 nm CMOS. “The planned radar chip will be affordable for every car and provide the safety features that today are available to only a small fraction of drivers,” O said.
The collision-avoidance radar market is expected to quickly grow to $2B by the year 2010. The need is great: The World Health Organization reports that 1.2 million lives are lost and another 50 million injured annually because of crashes.
David Yeh, director of IC and system sciences at SRC-GRC and an assignee from Texas Instruments Inc. (TI, Dallas), said, “This significantly increases the market space for chips, and can save lives for the cost of only a few dollars each.”
Several automobile parts suppliers and car manufacturers are evaluating the technology. Interested chipmakers include IBM (Armonk, N.Y.), TI and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. (Austin, Texas), according to the SRC.
SMTA 3D Meeting in Research Triangle PArk
05/10/2008
