ADI on DSP chips....................
sumnet.com
Analog Devices, Inc.
Elbowing TI In DSPs
By Gale Morrison
Norwood, Mass.--Pointing to groundwork laid three years ago and since, Analog Devices president/CEO Jerald G.
Fishman told the financial community last week that the company has redeemed itself. The company planned all this fall to do
that and he backed up his words with simultaneous new DSP technology announcements with significant upside potential.
Then Mr. Fishman shared with analysts details of a new, close tie with Intel to be specified for power management ICs.
First, Analog is shipping a single chip modem to grab 56Kps (X2) DSP supply share at 3Com from Texas Instruments. At
week's end, the 56K world really jumped when participants made progress on reaching an apparent compromise on what
the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) 56K standard would be. 3Com cancelled interviews regarding the ADI
relationship in order to respond to that development, and Lucent and Rockwell, of the K56flex camp, lauded it (See story,
below).
Nevertheless, ADI is very confident that the single-chip modem--which is reprogrammable because of its DSP nature--will
win designs and engineering share of mind. The industry is acknowledging as the year closes out that only the companies
with their elbows deep in analog design and manufacturing can back up all the "System-On-A-Chip" rhetoric.
David French, VP/GM of Analog Devices, detailed the single chip modem from Taiwan, where he was visiting the
company's foundry for the part, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (TSMC) and other customers, it was said.
ADI uses TSMC heavily, and Mr. Fishman said the company is also employing foundry Chartered Semiconductor
Manufacturing, with whom the company has been working more.
Taking DSP Business From TI
Mr. French could not discuss any detail about 3Com's plans for the device. In November, the company did not know
whether or not the networking leader under pressure (See story, page 48) would allow the relationship to be divulged. The
day after ADI's announcement, Texas Instruments issued statements saying that it and 3Com still remained "close, strategic
partners" and quoted the same Jerry Devlin, 3Com VP/GM, who spoke on behalf of ADI the day before.
Mr. French said the single chip modem is a "DSP core (up to 66 MIPS, 2181-compatible), some amount of SRAM and to
some extent ROM, which goes up to 4M," and certain custom logic. He said the device would reduce 3Com's current four-
to six-layer modem boards to having two layers, meaning a 75 percent reduction in board area. Mr. Fishman proudly
discussed the program with 3Com that he said "began over three years ago with US Robotics (which merged with 3Com
last spring)."
The CEO said that the 3Com part is "the most important and exciting event in our DSP business. 3Com is going to include
the device in its current and future 56K modem products." He said that the device integrates the DSP data pump and
monitor, a speaker digital-to-analog (D-to-A) converter, a handest codec, and SRAM (for protocol software).
"We've been working on this program with US Robotics for the better part of three years. As everybody knows, there's an
entrenched DSP supplier (Texas Instruments). It was not a simple matter for us to get share of mind there," Mr. Fishman
told analysts from banks across the country. "We're now working with many groups at 3Com for many different
applications."
"We understand that USR (3Com) is selling about a million modems a month," he said, which of course would mean that
Texas Instruments was selling 3Com and the other X2 OEMs at least that many DSPs a month. "We think that there will be
a reasonably orderly transition of some of this business to Analog.
"It would be very speculative to try to predict right now, . . . But the switch would be by each OEM, one at a time. We see
a fairly orderly transition of a reasonable share of (Texas Instruments') business," he said.
The analysts threw out two percentages. Would he be happy with 25 percent of TI's 56K DSP business in 12 months' time?
Mr. Fishman said he would be disappointed if it wasn't at that figure. How about 50 percent? "I won't be happy until I have
all (the 3Com business), but I'm not expecting that," he said playfully.
A 3Com spokesman said he had no information about 3Com's intentions for the ADI silicon, which an ADI spokesman said
has been with 3Com for months. "No products are announced yet," the 3Com spokesman said. When the word of the
compromise and possibility of an ITU 56K standard coming in January broke last week, that "took precedence" and
3Com's modem managers were unavailable.
Texas Instruments' Keith Barber said that TI offers modem OEMs a customizable, programmable product (as the ADI
single chip is), and "that allows (the OEM) to do what they want with it." He said that "we allow the user to mix and match
whatever they want."
Mr. Barber replaced Juan Garza in speaking on the subject of TI DSPs for modems. Mr. Garza left TI for an unnamed,
Sacramento-area company about a week ago, Mr. Barber said.
ADI's Mr. French said: "We believe that this is not available from TI and that they are not able to come up with this kind of
integration, at least that is what the marketplace tells us." Whether Lucent and Rockwell and the rest of the K56flex camp
would have a similar offering could not be determined, as those companies were tied up on the standard compromise as
well.
ADI's 1998 Promise(s)
As for future products stemming from the work done specifically for 3Com/USR, Mr. French said that ADI targets several
applications with the part: PC subscriber modems, remote access server (RAS) modems, asynchronous digital subscriber
line (ADSL) modems, digital wireless handsets, PC audio, and industrial and "white goods" motor control (which would be a
successor to their ADMC300 motor control IC). "This is the first of many custom designs under way with major OEMs,"
Mr. French said, a fact which Mr. Fishman reiterated, saying word of these will come in 1Q98.
In the other concurrent ADI wins: with software partner Euphonics, the company will disclose today that it will ship a
much-advanced PC audio device, under the name SoundMax 64, for the end of the century Windows desktop market; with
software partner Aware, ADI now has a two-year roadmap for further discrete multi-tone (DMT) ADSL chipsets; and
Analog is ramping an idled Sunnyvale, Calif., fab to meet the aforementioned power managememnt needs of Intel, which the
company expects to also mean the needs of the other Intel motherboard manufacturers.
The SoundMax 64 PC audio hardware and software, engineered with Boulder, Co.-based EuPhonics, contains an Intel DC
'97 digital-ready AD1818 SoundComm accelerator. ADI expects to trump audio IC hardware players ESS, Creative Labs,
Yamaha, National Semiconductor and Crystal Semiconductor, among others, with this $15-20 part.
With "EuSynth" software from EuPhonics, the DSP and accompanying parts are to support the highest end of PC audio
specifications, including 3-D, surround sound, DVD formats requirements, and all the DirectSound bells and whistles that
Microsoft is including in Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0. The AD1818 parts are sampling in 1Q98 and shipping in
2Q98, and the ability to have the same DSP control a 56K modem has been engineered, according to product manager
John Croteau. NEC is using the devices of the current-generation of this part in its Pentium II-based PCs for the Japanese
market.
Still, perhaps because he was talking to the financial community and they brought up ADI's foibles there, Mr. Fishman
downplayed the PC audio IC supply and didn't talk of the SoundMax 64 and SoundComm developments as true
redemption. Mr. Fishman acknowledged that ADI missed the market for the last generation of PC audio devices, and he
told analysts that ADI is not counting on that market as a bread winner.
On the ADSL front, '910 DSP customers Ericsson and Samsung endorsed the new roadmap with software company
Aware. ADI is after Texas Instruments--with its recent Amati purchase offer--in this area as well. Hans-Erhard Reiter,
marketing and sales manager of Ericsson's Multi-Service Access division, said at the meeting: "Right now, ADI and Aware
are in the most favorable position to deliver ATM and packet switching ADSL on silicon." ADI and Aware are defining
PCI-bus-based hardware and software for subscriber side modems, it was said.
ADI has something of a mixed signal, system-on-a-chip in its ADSP-21msp415 GSM standard wireless handset IC. But
Mr. Fishman acknowledged that the GSM handset market "has been very soft," though expectations are for a resurgence in
2Q98.
Into An Intel Design
On the new Intel business, Mr. Fishman said: "We are very proud of the relationship ADI has been building with Intel on
power management products, to make our 9240 hardware monitoring device part of their 'Deschutes' reference design. On
that, we shipped samples in Q4, and we expect volume in Q2."
He said parts would go to Intel for both the general motherboard and the laptop market. "Remember, that up to about nine
months ago, we didn't have any business with Intel, and it was a conscious decision we made about 18 months ago to get
standard linear IC (SLIC) business with them," he said.
Mr. Fishman did not say specifically that the ramping Sunnyvale fab was to meet Intel's needs, but certain advanced SLICs
for which ADI expects significantly more business will be built there. "What's notable is the breadth of the recovery for ADI.
We are ramping our newest six-inch linear fab in Sunnyvale, which had been idling since early '97 when business turned
down." |
