Friday, June 8, 2012

Digitally Controlled Impedance

Working with Xilinx Virtex5 FPGA , I found this feature called DCI (Digitally controlled Impedance) very interesting. 

If we have an IC with several hundred pins and one wants to pull up all the GPIO pins through a resistor and further connect it to some simple device say, switches. Then in a conventional scenario one needs hundreds of resistors to be connected. This increases the area consumed. 
If the IC has DCI, it will match all termination resistors(which will be some transistors already fabricated on the chip ) to this reference resistor and terminate internally. This decreasing the resistors required and the area.

I know only from the application point of view , but will look into how is this implemented in near future.

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