In this talk, we will examine the current process technology options available to the analog designer and use our foggy crystal ball to predict whether core digital CMOS or modular BiCMOS will emerge as the mainstream choice for mixed-signal and RF chip designs in the early part of this. We will then describe some work with Jason Fritts to evaluate programmable architectures for single-chip video processors. We performed a large number of experiments using the MediaBench benchmarks to evaluate VLIW and superscalar processors' performance on media processing. These experiments helped us determine the effectiveness of a number of architectural features for media processing. The impact of feedback is far broader than how it transformed electrical engineering, both in what could be accomplished and in how EEs are educated.
Feedback is ubiquitous.
This talk begins to address several questions concerning feedback. Because of this sudden and unexpected growth, there has been a frenzied scramble to train RF engineers to meet the high demand. A major challenge in this task is that RF design is multidisciplinary in nature, requiring knowledge of communications and signal propagation theory, transceiver architectures, and circuit design. The essence of the method is to break up the required dynamic range of the filter in smaller ranges, and utilize separate filters in each one of them. This is done in such a way that the output is not disturbed whenever a different filter takes over.