Investor's Business Daily
Texas Instruments Finding New Markets For High-End Chips
Friday May 30, 6:21 pm ET
James Detar
Good old digital signal processors have been around since the former Bell Labs rolled out the first one in 1979.
DSPs take analog signals such as light and sound and convert them into digital bits. When decoded, these bits become the sound coming out of speakers and the streaming video on PCs and high-def TVs.
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These handy devices are finding their way into new places, creating new opportunities for No. 1 DSP maker Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN - News).
TI is seeing strong growth in the high-performance segment of the DSP market. It had total sales of $13.8 billion last year. Of that, $5.24 billion, or 38%, was from DSP sales. In its last quarter, TI said sales of certain specialty DSPs, such as those in biometric security devices, rose 63% from the year-earlier quarter.
Cell phones have been the top market for TI's DSPs. Digital cameras, MP3 music players and more products also use them. But the company is moving deeper into some markets that have higher profit margins, including medical gear.
"I see customers have great ideas sitting on the shelf, waiting for the right thing to come along," said TI's chief DSP design engineer Ray Simar. The right thing, he says, are new multicore DSPs from TI.
Multicore chips have only recently come out in the world of processors, the key chips used to run PCs and mostly made by Intel (NasdaqGS:INTC - News) and Advanced Micro Devices (NYSE:AMD - News). But in the less complex DSP field, chips with two or more "cores" on a single piece of silicon have been around awhile.
The multicores make the chips powerful without the need for much more energy to use them. Lower power use in chips is a key technical challenge and a necessity to make sure today's electronic products work fast without overheating.
While the new multicore chips from Intel and AMD always get a lot of press, TI has quietly shipped more than 1 billion multicore chips since 1996.
TI is expected to go after some new markets with multicore DSPs, says Aileen Arcilla, an analyst with research firm IDC.
"A number of chip companies are trying to focus" on high-performance multicore chips, Arcilla says. "TI -- with its DSP experience -- it doesn't surprise me they would try to leverage that in new areas."
Simar says more medical products using TI's DSPs are in the works.
TI's annual product developer conference earlier this year impressed Simar with some new applications that appear to be close to market-ready.
"We had someone with what you could call a digital stethoscope," he said. "You put it on a heart and track the heartbeat. And doctors can begin to process and analyze the data on the heartbeat right away."
Simar says the device is in testing and could be out in the next few years.
He says another new use for TI multicore DSPs is in the emerging market of biometrics, or methods of recognizing individuals based on physical traits such as fingerprints. One proposed product uses DSPs to help with facial recognition, Simar says.
"The device is looking at hundreds of points on the face," Simar said. "People could consider doing it before, but it was hard to meet the cost goals."
Simar says another TI customer was using a TI multicore DSP and a specialized processing chip to run the Linux operating software. But now, the customer has found a way to let DSPs do all the heavy lifting, so it's decided to run the Linux software on TI's high-performance DaVinci chip, eliminating the processor and saving costs.
"As we integrate more onto these multicore DSPs, they can run Linux and other operating software," he said. "Customers are getting more creative."
Craig Barratt, chief executive of wireless chipmaker Atheros (NasdaqGS:ATHR - News), says TI "clearly has a rich set of capabilities" in wireless.
He says TI has partnered with Atheros for wireless chips to go with its DaVinci line of multimedia DSPs and other chips for TV set-top boxes and the like.
"With DaVinci, TI cannot just provide processing to customers. They have to provide a complete set of capabilities," Barratt said.
So, he says, TI went outside the company for its wireless chip, choosing to team up with Atheros.
"By working together, we can create more complete solutions," Barratt said. |
