Trends in the consumer electronics industry including in IC design, analog and mixed signal IP, software design costs and outsourcing.

1. The Future of Hardware and
Software Design Technologies James O’Riordan
CTO
Silicon & Software Systems (S3)
CEIA Conference, 21st October 2008
Copyright © 2007-2008 Silicon & Software Systems Limited

2. Agenda
Industry Background
Industry Trends
Consumer Electronics
IC Top Level
IC Verification
Analog / Mixed-Signal
Software
Outsourcing

3. Industry Background
•60 years since 1st transistor
•50 years since 1st IC
•Industry is in a maturing stage
•No longer 17% average growth
•Consolidation / re-structuring
•To play requires ‘long-term’ ability
•It can take 8 years to get to profits
•It can be an expensive journey
•Acknowledgements: Warren East (CEO, ARM), Maria Marced (VP Europe, TSMC),
colleagues, ITRS (http://www.itrs.net/reports.html)

4. Industry Trends
• Emergence of the Fabs
• Everyone has access to the same manufacturing
capability!
• Multi-project wafers (MPW) – share the cost of
prototypes
• Advancing geometries
– 130, 90, 65, 40, 28 …
– Cost a lot
– Need volume to justify
– What products have this
volume?
• But half of TSMC volume
is <=0.18um
Copyright © 2007-2008 Silicon & Software Systems Limited Slide 4

5. Who are S3?
The Connected Consumer Technology™ Company
Brief Statistics Consumer Portable
Founded in 1986 Size/weight
260+ Employees Battery Life
6 Design Centres Globally Function increase 2x / 2 years
Consumer Electronics Focus Time to market: ASAP
SoC Drivers Consumer Stationary
Cost
Processing performance
Form Factor
Mains powered (but regulations!!!)
Connection speed
Functionality in Software
Reliability
Life-in-Market longer

6. IC Top Level
Platform-based Re-use
Design 2007: 38% re-use
Speeds up design, 2010: 50% re-use
both IC & SW
Low power Electronic System
Very important Level design
Multi-core Going mainstream?
All major players
Supported suppliers

7. IC Verification
“Without major breakthroughs, design verification will
be a non-scalable, show stopping barrier”ITRS2007
• Functional coverage
• Constrained random verification
• Formal verification

8. Analog / Mixed-Signal (1)
The drivers for wireless communication are:
• Cost
• Frequency bands
• Power consumption
• Functionality
• Size of mobile units
• Very high volumes
• Standards and protocols
• 2007: 80% of TSMC ICs have
20% mixed-signal content
• 2010: 90% of TSMC ICs have
20% mixed-signal content

9. Analog Mixed-Signal (2)
• Mixed-Signal IP
– Don’t start from scratch each time
– Buy-in IP
– Economy of scale advantage
• DSP up to the Antenna
– Software Defined Radio
• Innovation in circuit design
• Smarter Simulation
• Redundant circuits(?)

10. Software
Software can account for 80% of the development cost
Software is an integral part of the system
• Good HW alone won’t get you Power savings
• Total system design must be considered
Move from proprietary micro-kernels to Linux / WinCE
• Possible component based design?
Multi-core
• Diminishing returns from increasing clock speed
• Enables multiple wireless stacks,
richer applications etc.
• Homogeneous and Heterogeneous processors
Software Defined Radio
Verification of Software
• Traditionally on-chip
• Virtual Platform?

11. Software Design Costs - ITRS

12. Outsourcing
• A start-up should not attempt to do everything itself
• Keep focused on market
• Design is outsource-able
– If you don’t do something very often,
you have less experience at it,
• slower
• more errors
• tool costs etc.
– If you can’t utilise one of
your resources 100% of
the time, why pay for it
100% of the time?
• Remember your competition is doing this …
Copyright © 2007-2008 Silicon & Software Systems Limited Slide 12

13. Questions?
Copyright © 2007-2008 Silicon & Software Systems Limited