Milestone-Proposal talk:Integrated Circuits for Satellite Digital Radio, 1996-1997

Advocates’ Checklist

1. Is proposal for an achievement rather than for a person? If the citation includes a person's name, have the proposers provided the required justification for inclusion of the person's name?
2. Was proposed achievement a significant advance rather than an incremental improvement to an existing technology?
3. Were there prior or contemporary achievements of a similar nature?
4. Has the achievement truly led to a functioning, useful, or marketable technology?
5. Is proposal adequately supported by significant references (minimum of five) such as patents, contemporary newspaper articles, journal articles, or citations to pages in scholarly books? At least one of the references from a peer-reviewed scholarly book or journal article. The full text of the material, not just the references, shall be present. If the supporting texts are copyright-encumbered and cannot be posted on the ETHW for intellectual property reasons, the proposers shall email a copy to the History Center so that it can be forwarded to the advocate. If the advocate does not consider the supporting references sufficient, the advocate may ask the proposer(s) for additional ones.
6. Are the scholarly references sufficiently recent?
7. Is proposed citation readable and understandable by the general public?
8. Does the proposed plaque site fulfill the requirements? Is the address complete? Are the GPS coordinates correct and in decimal format?
9. Is the proposal quality comparable to that of IEEE publications?
10. Scientific and technical units correct? (e.g. km, mm, hertz, etc.) Are acronyms correct and properly upperercased or lowercased?
11. Date formats correct as specified in Section 6 of Milestones Program Guidelines? https://ieeemilestones.ethw.org/Helpful_Hints_on_Citations,_Plaque_Locations

Reviewers’ Checklist

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?
2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?
3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?
4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?

In answering the questions above, the History Committee asks that reviewers apply a similar level of rigor to that used to peer-review an article, or evaluate a research proposal. Some elaboration is desirable. Of course the Committee would welcome any additional observations that you may have regarding this proposal.

Submission and Approval Log

Submitted date: 10 March 2024
Advocate approval date: 21 July 2024
History Committee approval date:
Board of Directors approval date:

Original Citation Title and Text -- Administrator4 (talk) 17:20, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

Integrated Circuits for Satellite Digital Radio, 1996-1997

On 1996 STMicroelectronics devised three integrated circuits essential for satellite digital radio reception. Frequency demodulation, baseband processing and compressed audio decoding were engineered and implemented into, respectively, STA001, STA002 and STA003 within a low power cost, effective envelope. In 1997 they were fully functional and enabled the receiver’s mass production. Worldspace and Sirius XM Radio services adopted them and provided inexpensive educational and entertainment services in Africa, India, and USA.

Expert review - Giuseppe Pamisano -- Coronath (talk) 20:40, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Giuseppe Palmisano, provided attached checklist to support the milestone

Full Professor, Università di Catania, DIEEI Viale A. Doria, 6; I-95125 Catania, Italy Tel.: + 39 095 738 2305

e-mail:giuseppe.palmisano@unict.it

web:http://www.dieei.unict.it/docenti/giuseppe.palmisano

BIO

---

Giuseppe Palmisano received the Laurea degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 1982. From 1983 to 1991, he was a researcher at the Department of Electronics of the University of Pavia, where he was involved in CMOS and BiCMOS analog integrated circuit design. In 1992, he was visiting professor at UAM (Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana), Mexico City, Mexico, where he held a course on microelectronics for Ph.D. students. In 1993 and 2000, he joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Catania as Associate Professor and Full Professor, respectively, teaching microelectronics. Since 1999, he has been leading the Radio Frequency Advanced Design Center (RFADC), a joint research center supported by University of Catania and STMicroelectronics, Catania, Italy. He has supervised the design of several innovative analog integrated circuits and systems within the framework of Italian and European research projects and in collaboration with electronic industries. He is the co-author of more than 250 papers in international journals and conference proceedings, 60 international patents, and 3 books. His research interests lie in the area of analog integrated circuit design with special emphasis to RF and microwave applications. Recently, he has been facing ultra-low power sub-GHz RF front-ends and remotely-powered transceivers based on RF energy harvesting. Presently, he is involved in the radar sensor in 28-nm SOI CMOS technology and wireless power/data transfer systems with galvanic isolation both for automotive applications.

Checklist review:

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate? Yes. The proposed work is very valid and represents a great advancement in terms of electronic integration level.

2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation? Yes. The proposal is significant and full of content.

3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement? Yes. The proposed work is a pioneering development for its time.

4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?

The proposers well described competing achievements and highlighted the performance of the proposed work in comparison with existing solutions. Specifically, a technical competition at that time came from ITT that however proposed an electronic system with both low integration level and low innovation. Indeed, the ITT system implemented a tuner by assembling on a PCB with a discrete approach available components on the shelf (PLLs, XO, LNA-Mixer, IF Amplifier and Mixer, power management) to perform the different system functionalities. The proposers instead implemented a monolithic single-chip RF tuner (STA001), also including critical RF blocks, thus achieving a high-performance system with high integration level.

Expert review: Frederic Petrot -- Coronath (talk) 20:49, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

BIO - Frederic Petrot received the PhD degree in Computer Science from Universite Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI), Paris, France, in 1994, where has been Associate Professor in Computer Science until September 2004. He joined TIMA in September 2004, where he holds a professor position at Grenoble Institute of Technology, France.

He led the System Level Synthesis team of TIMA during 14 years, and was deputy director of the lab during 6 years. He teaches computer architecture and operating system design at the Ensimag, Grenoble engineering school focused on computer science, and was deputy director there during 4 years.

F. Pétrot's research interests are in multiprocessor systems on chip architectures, including circuits and software aspects, and CAD tools for the design and evaluation of hardware/software systems. He currently holds the Digital Hardware AI Architectures chair of Grenoble Multidisciplinary Institute in Artificial Intelligence.

Professor Frédéric Pétrot, PhD, frederic.petrot@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr, Cell Phone : +33 6 74 57 99 65

Subject: Request for Expert Review of IEEE Milestones Proposal "Integrated Circuits for Satellite Digital Radio"

     The Milestone targets an area that is now considered legacy, but that was very challenging at that time.
     It ended up in mass production of chips that were integrated in portable radio devices at first devoted towards the reception of educational and entertainment programs in remote and emerging areas of the world.
     Thanks to signal processing advances and VLSI technology integration, both the size and the power consumption of the radios were minimized, leading to a broad usage.
     Overall, I strongly support this Milestone given the technological advances and usefulness it led to.

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?

     Yes indeed. The Citation is faithfully reporting the work done on satelitte digital radio reception and its usefulness, in particular for emerging and developing countries at that time.

2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?

     Yes.
     The proposal first indicates that the presented technological developments had the goal of allowing building very low cost and very low power satellite digital radio receptors that could be used in remote area of the world.
     Second, the proposal expresses very clearly the technological and architectural challenges, from both a design and implementation point of view, that widespread portable and mobile satellite digital radio posed. It also presents quite well the solution integrating a combination of the right semi-conductor technologies (bipolar, bicmos, and cmos), signal processing research (channel decoding), and audio andtransmission standards (mpeg, ac3, dab).
     In the end, the proposal indicates that the designs were mass-produced and used within the vast majority of portable satellite digital radios.

3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?

     Yes.
     Satellite radio was for sure existing before the milestone development, but it then required a large static dish to get the satellite signal, and large amount of power to perform the signal and audio processing.
     The decision taken by STMicro of integrating the RF tuner, channel decoding and source decoding into 3 chips allowed to implement the needed functionalities on the most relevant technology, giving the best performances while lowering the power envelope.
     It was also a necessity for the development of portable and mobile devices.
     In terms of technical achievements, the 3 chips had to face their own challenges.

     Monolithic RF design was still mainly handcrafted at that time, and the integration of the whole radio frontend needed innovative architectural and implementation techniques.
     Only two quick respins on STMicro 20 GHz bicmos technology were necessary to achieve the expected gain and noise figures.
     Four scientific papers (among which three in highly recognized IEEE journals and conferences) and two patents present the design and implementation choices of the monolithic RF receptor.

     The channel decoder was including a wealth of configurable and parametrizable IPs to perform analog to digital conversion, broadband signal processing, error correction, decryption, etc.
     High level modeling, using approaches that are similar to what SystemC would become, was used upfront to validate the overall architecture and its parameterization, which was quite innovative at that time.
     This chip has been the subject of six international patents.

     The source decoder was software based, using an in-house specified, designed and implemented VLIW (very long instruction word) processor.
     Interestingly enough, at that time compilation for VLIW architecture was just starting (the seminal paper of Bob Rau dates 1994), so not only the hardware had to be design, but also the whole software stack.
     The processor was fully programmed in C, including critical low level routines, which increased by orders of magnitude the productivity of the software team compared to their competitors that were writing code in assembler.
     The processor was 16/24 fixed point arithmetic, very well suited to decompress audio stream (and in particular mp3).
     Using 24-bit was a sweet spot: high audio quality for lower silicon footprint (and thus cost).
     It gave STMicro a competitive advantage, making it 2000, using a derivative of this chip, the first IC provider in mp3 decoding.
     This circuit led to the publication of two papers (in some of the best IEEE conferences of the domain) and one patent.

     In essence, these three chips were very innovative thanks to a mixture of advanced semiconductor technology, design methods, design decisions, and rapid fabrication, mastered within a single organization.

4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?

     Yes.
     Most of the competition was using off-the-self discrete components for tuner design, requiring much larger power sources.
     Their ability to perform efficient signal processing was thus limited, required using large antennas, generally parabolic dishes, making portable (and even more mobile) usage impractical.
     Two competitors are specifically mentioned in the proposal.
     ITT, that was using pre-existing discrete parts and thus could drastically shorten the design time.
     However, the system was more or less hardwired, without much room for configuration and innovation.
     In addition it could achieve neither the same quality nor the same power envelop.
     Agere System, that also was targeting an integrated system solution.
     However, it was not as configurable and efficient as STMicro solution, which led the system integrators to favor STMicro design after the first generation.

Expert review - Boris Murmann -- Coronath (talk) 22:11, 21 July 2024 (UTC)

Reviewer’s short bio Boris Murmann is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa. From 2004-2023 he served as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. From 1994 to 1997, he was with Neutron Microelectronics, Hanau, Germany, where he developed low-power and smart-power ASICs. Since 2004, he has worked as a consultant with numerous Silicon Valley companies. His research interests are in the area of mixed-signal integrated circuit design, including sensor interfaces, A/D and D/A conversion, high-speed communication links, embedded machine learning (tinyML) as well as open-source chip design. Dr. Murmann was a co-recipient of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2008 and 2021 VLSI Circuits Symposia, as well as a recipient of the Best Invited Paper Award at the 2008 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC). He received the 2009 Agilent Early Career Professor Award, the 2012 Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation, and the 2021 SIA-SRC University Researcher Award for lifetime research contributions to the U.S. semiconductor industry. He is a fellow of the IEEE and currently chairs the IEEE SSCS Technical Committee on the Open-Source Ecosystem. https://ee.hawaii.edu/faculty/profile?usr=121

Reviewers’ Checklist

1. Is suggested wording of the Plaque Citation accurate?

The wording is accurate and highlights the key elements of the milestone achievement. On the technical side, it highlights the three-chip approach, while on the humanitarian/application side it links to enabling inexpensive radio service to less- developed countries and for entertainment.

2. Is evidence presented in the proposal of sufficient substance and accuracy to support the Plaque Citation?

The presented evidence is extraordinarily strong and corresponds to what is also known in the technical community. There are numerous publications (on IEEEXplore) and data sheets that verify the technical aspects. The application aspects are public domain information that is also well-summarized in the IEEE Spectrum article “DIGITAL RADIO TAKES TO THE ROAD.”

3. Does proposed milestone represent a significant technical achievement?

The proposed milestone undoubtedly represents a significant achievement. A key aspect is that very few technical players worldwide had the ability to deliver the described innovations. With expertise in integrated circuit process technology, RF circuits, digital logic, and signaling processing all under the same umbrella, STMicroelectronics had a distinct advantage over its competitors. This was leveraged to create a product with unprecedented form factor and low cost and a unique three-chip solution. This achievement is important to highlight not only for documentation purposes, but also to inspire future innovation in “deep tech,” which is currently waning due to an ongoing software boom.

4. Were there similar or competing achievements? If so, have the proposers adequately described these and their relationship to the achievement being proposed?

There were a number of competing players/achievements, and they are fully documented in the nomination. The innovation landscape at that time is also fully described in the linked articles (including the aforementioned IEEE Spectrum article “DIGITAL RADIO TAKES TO THE ROAD.”

Approval of proposal, submission is complete -- Coronath (talk) 03:18, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

I approve of the proposal, and the submission is complete.

Keith Moore

Advocate, Milestone-Proposal talk:Integrated Circuits for Satellite Digital Radio, 1996-1997 (new section)

keith.moore@ieee.org

An Example of an Excellent Proposal -- Bberg (talk) 13:09, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

This is an example of an excellent proposal, and it shows how a set of inventive integrated circuits provided a humanitarian benefit, and led to technology that is used to this day. I had the privilege of working with the proposer Danilo Pau, and the Advocate Keith Moore, on improvements to the proposal and citation.

Brian Berg: IEEE History Committee Vice Chair & Milestones Subcommittee Chair