[World Market] ADI's methodology that goes beyond Moore's Law, combining innovation to build the "iron triangle" of technological innovation

Vincent Roche, President and CEO of Analog Devices, speaks at ISSCC 2018

Just like in Transformers 5, despite facing strong challenges, three key forces finally joined forces to save the earth. In fact, the semiconductor engineering community has been continuing the magic of Moore's Law through various technological innovations, and more people have gone beyond the boundaries of Moore's Law and expanded their innovative thinking to a wider range of fields. Vincent Roche, president and CEO of ADI, a global high-performance analog technology provider, gave a triangular combination innovation system that goes beyond Moore's Law in his speech at the 2018 International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2018) - technology, physical system and ecosystem.

Triangular innovation system: technology, physical system and ecosystem

In the triangle system of "Beyond Moore's Law" thinking given by Vincent Roche, the biggest feature of the technology theme is to expand the scope of technological innovation, layer the technology and combine other technologies based on semiconductors to obtain new innovative results. For example, adopt new materials, add more chemical elements or deploy new processes and packaging technologies to create new passive and active devices and more complex and complete system-on-chip hardware architectures. Break out of the inherent model of relying solely on traditional technology drivers to achieve innovation, consider more physical system possibilities and business model needs, and invest in more areas including software, algorithms, applications, and content.

ADI believes that the entire semiconductor industry is adopting an "application demand-driven" approach to supplement and improve the traditional technology supply-driven approach. The latter focuses on driving improvements in major aspects such as performance, size, cost, and power efficiency, while the former starts from the problems that need to be solved and works backwards to match innovation with applications more efficiently and effectively. This is also the innovation concept that ADI has always adhered to.

This chip-scale pH sensor without semiconductor materials opens up new applications in the fields of industry, medicine, and pharmaceuticals

In fact, ADI has been doing this for decades. For example, the pH sensor in the picture can bring the performance of laboratory instrumentation to small devices at a reasonable cost, but it does not have any semiconductor content at all. Instead, it uses processes such as electroplating and wafer bonding to achieve characteristics that are impossible with CMOS wafers. This is a perfect example of combining innovation with new materials and new elements. Of course, ADI has not avoided using silicon chips in the "More Than Moore's Law" strategy. They are still working hard to combine these sensors with ASICs for combined development, opening up countless possibilities and advantages, and ultimately improving efficiency.

ADI's bold exploration of expanding technology has created a large number of successful cases. For example, the iCoupler® magnetic isolation technology is used to achieve on-chip transformer integration, which has solved the limitations of traditional optical coupling in a breakthrough way. The uniquely designed electrostatically driven gold-plated micro-machined cantilever beam switch structure is used to implement MEMS switch technology, achieving broadband RF performance from 0 Hz to hundreds of GHz in a very small surface-mount device, as well as higher reliability than relays. The µModule micro-modular technology used by ADI's Power By Linear brand has been continuously improved over the past 10 years. The power density of these products has increased by more than 10 times, and the latest module power supply is about to exceed the power output capacity of 100A.

Innovative uModule packaging technology increases power density by more than 10 times

With the "application demand-driven" mindset, ADI's technological innovation is no longer limited to the semiconductor field. It has also introduced platform functional design concepts such as the Internet of Things and cloud analysis into its hardware solutions, and invested in application tools, security and algorithms as well as software to continuously build a complete integrated hardware-based technology stack.

Today's technology has reached a new level of insight into physical, chemical and biological phenomena, which can inspire us to develop products and help determine the direction of development. Therefore, ADI believes that going beyond Moore's Law also requires innovation at the physical system level, shifting the focus from the inside to the world around us. This is why ADI not only funds outstanding analog, digital and software engineers, but also funds chemists, cryptographers, biomedical system engineers, and even physicians.

Medical Device Realization Center Joins ADI and MIT to Advance Medical Technology Breakthroughs

With these investments, AD's team of experts strives to fully understand the applications that need to be solved with specific technologies and capabilities. In fact, the emergence of things such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence is reducing the importance of traditional innovation methods and the limitations on innovation. The emergence of the Internet of Things, coupled with the surge in chip-sized sensors and computing elements, is intelligently connecting the real and digital worlds, making the Shannon-Hartley Law (the law about channel capacity) more important than Moore's Law for information transmission.

Today's methods for innovation are constantly evolving. We have entered the world of cloud analysis and big data, and artificial intelligence is also on the road to neural networks and massive parallel processing. Technological innovation has entered a new stage, requiring us to embrace a wider range of application innovation thinking and methods. For example, in recent years, ADI has helped New England tomato farmers build a complete sensor-to-cloud solution based on its expertise in detection, measurement, and conversion, as well as in-depth research on the Internet of Things ecosystem, enabling them to make better decisions throughout the planting cycle, ultimately improving the quality of tomatoes and improving economic and environmental benefits. Similarly, in the energy field, many utilities' advanced metering infrastructure has adopted the Internet of Things, and the use of ADI's complete edge-to-cloud, non-intrusive monitoring solutions has helped them solve the accuracy problems of traditional meters.

In recent years, ADI has spared no effort in industrial ecological cooperation, jointly building technology platforms with large institutions and jointly promoting the cooperative development of application technologies with professional manufacturers. For example, ADI announced a strategic partnership with China Mobile IoT, a wholly-owned subsidiary of China Mobile Communications Group, one of the world's largest telecom operators, signed a memorandum of understanding with Nokia Bell to jointly expand the Internet of Things market, and reached cooperation with Baidu in the field of autonomous driving perception and navigation to jointly promote the Apollo project.

ADI and Baidu collaborate extensively on autonomous driving perception and navigation applications for the Apollo autonomous driving program

ADI's Chief Technology Officer Peter Real has very clear thoughts on industrial ecosystem cooperation: you need to know when to lead, when to follow, when to invent together, and when to work together. Obviously, ADI has followed these principles well in ecological cooperation and innovation. In addition to the above strategic cooperation, it also includes the establishment of various joint laboratories with industry application manufacturers for technology application innovation ecosystem cooperation, as well as the coordination of internal and external resources to build a vertical ecosystem. RadioVerse, which has many fans in the communications industry, is the RF technology ecosystem that the company has concentrated resources to build in recent years.

When ADI first tried to solve the problem of software-defined radio, ADI launched a single-chip, low-power MIMO transceiver that greatly reduced the complexity of customers' radio design. The product has been deployed in thousands of applications, from camera drone video transmission and control to cellular base stations. After realizing the potential for more applications of transceivers, ADI began to try to build an ecosystem-RadioVerse, which includes MathWorks and a variety of third-party hardware and software packages, in order to help narrow the gap between system architects, RF designers and system software developers at the beginning of designing software-defined radios, helping customers achieve more sophisticated and efficient designs while accelerating product launch.

The debate about whether Moore's Law is invalid has been going on for a long time. Blindly following this path will restrict our innovation ability to a certain extent. Isn't it time to break out of the established thinking framework and break free from the constraints of Moore's Law?

Today, the information explosion provides strong support for the exploration desire and adventurous spirit that humans are born with; the power of combinatorial innovation has been confirmed, and this innovative thinking is affecting the speed and way of the future world's progress; the real world and the digital world are gradually interacting and penetrating, and digitalization is becoming more and more common; the economy and technology are constantly coordinated and balanced. New technologies will continue to shape the economic form, and the economic form will in turn promote the development of new technologies, and so on. Under the joint action of these factors, the complexity of innovation will grow exponentially, and the cycle will continue to accelerate.

ADI has verified the effective combinatorial innovation thinking that goes beyond Moore's Law with its own innovative practice, and realized the accelerated innovation of semiconductor technology and applications in technology, physical systems and ecosystems. After more than 50 years of travel, the "long-distance train" of Moore's Law has arrived at the station. We might as well take the initiative to board the platform with ADI and embark on a new journey of combinatorial innovation.