LSI renews charge into consumer sector
eetimes.com
By Junko Yoshida
EE Times
(03/22/00, 11:33 p.m. EST)
PHOENIX, Ariz.?LSI Logic Corp., which has kept a low profile in
consumer ICs in recent years, is stepping up its consumer activities
with a focus on the digital video market, according to Hugh Durdan,
the company's new vice president and general manager of consumer
products.
Durdan said his group will target three areas over the next 18 months:
digital satellite set-tops, Sony Corp.'s Playstation 2 and DVD players.
LSI Logic plans to leverage its digital subscriber line (DSL) and
HomeRF silicon expertise to pry open design opportunities in
intermediate-generation Playstation 2 game consoles and two-way
digital satellite set-tops.
One digital video market the company won't pursue, however, is that
for HDTV decoder ICs. Durdan described the terrestrial digital HDTV
market in the United States as "practically nonexistent."
At a recent analysts meeting here, LSI Logic claimed that its digital
set-top business has been soaring since the fourth quarter. John
Daane, executive vice president of the communications products
group, noted that the capacity constraints recently experienced by
STMicroelectronics, in particular, have helped increase LSI Logic's
set-top IC business.
Durdan agreed. Although "we were late with our SC2000 single-chip
source decoder," he said, "a lot of customers are now open to talking
to us," either as a second source or as a replacement for market
leader STMicroelectronics.
STM's take on the market dynamic is that the "free box" campaigns
rolled out in mid-1999 by satellite service providers seeking to boost
subscriptions sent decoder demand through the roof. Some service
providers fretted that STMicroelectronics might not be able to deliver
promised chips on time, acknowledged Philippe Lambinet, general
manager of STM's digital video division (Grenoble, France).
But STMicroelectronics responded by increasing set-top decoder
production in Phoenix and in Crolles, France, said Lambinet. It also
qualified foundries in Taiwan and Singapore for the set-top product
line late last year. While set-top IC shipments last month doubled
those in February 1999, Lambinet said, "we also doubled our
production run rate in order to keep up with the demand."
It remains unclear whether the backlog that LSI claims to be tapping
will allow the company to unseat STM in some key design slots. "As
far as we know, we haven't lost any of our customers yet," Lambinet
said, adding that STMicroelectronics will increase capacity at its new
fab in Rousset, France, this year.
LSI's SC2000 integrates the functions of DVB transport with MPEG-2
A/V decoding, a 2-D graphics engine, a multistandard video encoder,
audio D/A converters and a TinyRISC CPU. Although LSI announced
the part last May and had promised volume shipments by third-quarter
1999, the chip is just sampling now. Volume production will begin this
month, according to a company spokeswoman.
Wireless, home nets targeted
Meanwhile, the company is looking to high-speed Internet
connectivity and wireless home networking as two major technology
drivers for its consumer division road map.
Adding a back-channel capability to satellite decoder boxes, via either
DSL or very small aperture (VSA) technologies, is the next step for
the division, Durdan said.
"Although nobody is deploying boxes yet, there have been a lot of
discussions among satellite service providers on the development of
two-way satellite connectivity," confirmed Michelle Abraham, senior
analyst for multimedia at Cahners In-Stat (Scottsdale, Ariz.). In
"playing catch-up with STMicro," she said, "it makes sense for LSI to
go after the two-way satellite market, especially considering its own
DSL technology."
Similarly, by exploiting its communication and wireless expertise, LSI
Logic hopes to pursue further design-ins in what Durdan called
"intermediate generation Playstation 2 boxes"-those offering
incremental improvements on the first model. The consoles will require
high-speed data connectivity and home networking capabilities,
Durdan said.
The current Sony console contains LSI Logic's I/O processor. The chip
is integrated with logic for maintaining backward compatibility with
software designed for the previous-generation Playstation, as well as
for handling such I/O capabilities as IEEE 1394 and USB.
Durdan said LSI's "goal is to continue to work with Sony" with an eye
toward design wins for the DSL and wireless HomeRF technologies
used in new incarnations of the Playstation 2. Working with Proxim,
LSI Logic became the first ASIC supplier for HomeRF last fall.
DVD will still play a role for LSI Logic's consumer IC business. LSI Logic
is more interested in pursuing DVD as a fixed standard platform than in
adding bells and whistles to its silicon to enable combo DVD systems,
said Durdan. The company expects China to be the biggest market for
its DVD chip set in 2001.
LSI is also keeping an eye on the rewritable DVD market. But with
players in that fragmented market confronting an embarrassment of
competing formats-DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM-Durdan said the
company will probably seek strength in numbers. "We will likely find a
partner first, by the end of this year, and then work on it together,"
he said. |
