On Jan. 17, 2014, Kilby Labs Dallas celebrated its fifth anniversary. In honor of this momentous occasion, we wanted to showcase an example of the hard work done by the engineers in Kilby Labs.
More and more great TI products come from collaborative work between universities, Kilby Labs and our product line teams. The LM3290 step-down converter with integrated DC boost and a companion LM3291 linear amplifier is just one example of how a TI product was developed - from an idea cultivated in a university all the way to market.
The LM3290 is an envelope tracker (ET) for smartphones and tablets. In 3G and 4G LTE smartphones, a large portion of the amplifier power ends up as heat, using up a lot of battery life. An ET makes it possible to enhance the amplifier power efficiency, giving consumers more life out of a battery.
“Until our product was introduced in October, ET had not been successfully deployed in a commercial cellular device. Many platforms and original equipment manufacturers now view it as a must-have in upcoming devices,” said John Hoversten, a systems engineer in the radio frequency (RF) Power Product Line.
Product development for the power management integrated circuits (ICs) involved a two-year TI funded research project at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU-Boulder), two years of research and development (R&D) inside Kilby Labs Silicon Valley, followed by product development in TI’s Mobile Devices Power’s (MDP) RF Power Product Line, eventually leading to an ET chipset. The device was released to market late last year, and has received a lot of attention from several major customers.
“It is a great privilege to see a project through from university-funded research to commercial deployment. This was made possible by a strong R&D group, focused business unit and a top-notch team,” said John.
John was the project’s primary researcher at CU-Boulder, where he began his work on high-efficiency RF concepts in graduate school in 2005. By 2008, the year TI began funding the ET project, he had a thorough understanding of the challenges of ET. He completed his Ph.D. at the university in 2010 with a dissertation on ET before going to work full time in Kilby Labs Silicon Valley (then National Semiconductor Labs).
John’s project is just one example of how research collaboration with universities can lead to successful products for TI. John also shows how permanently transferring a researcher from a university to Kilby Labs can pay off.
“Developing technology to a product-ready state is very difficult in the lab environment, and the business unit has to look carefully at assigning resources to a project in the early stages,” he said. “In some areas, only the business unit and associated industry contacts are able to provide the insight or solve the challenges. Early collaboration among the labs and product line was key to the labs project success.”
The same team that worked on the ET project at Kilby Labs Silicon Valley became an integral part of the business unit development team, effectively acting as an additional resource on loan to the business unit for about six months as the group worked through final engineering challenges of completing the product.
Juha Pennanen, a design manager based in Oulu, Finland, who managed and drove the project from the start, said a device like this could only be developed in this way – starting in a university, fostered in Kilby Labs and completed on the product line.
“Kilby Labs added muscle to the core experts to do an initial prototype integrated circuit (IC), something the university could not do because it lacked power management expertise, resources and processes,” said Juha. “Moving the project to the product line enabled full-fledged industry engagement and making a product – something not well-suited to Kilby Labs. All the phases were highly overlapping but still mandatory [for success].”
More information:
TI unveils envelope tracking DC/DC converter for 3G and 4G LTE smartphones
Power Systems Design podcast with TIer Sasa Radovanovic about RF power
EE Times article on power supply implications of envelope tracking
