Siemens Eyes The DSP
From Page One of Electronic News: January 19, 1998 Issue
By Gale Morrison
Munich--Anxious to diversify from its main DRAM business, Siemens Semiconductor is going to
jump right into the middle of the world digital signal processing (DSP) market this year, Ulrich
Schumacher, business group president/CEO--and Siemens AG's youngest boardmember in its
150-year history--told EN here last week.
The DSP strategy solidified in 1997 as Siemens watched with great dismay the prices of its
mainstay DRAMs tank, and watched its new signal processing division bring in some DM1.6
billion ($1 billion) in the FY ended Sept. 30. The revenue grew rapidly even though Siemens did
not release its TriCore 32-bit processing core, at least in the U.S., until mid-September, a few
weeks before the fiscal close-out.
Dr. Schumacher said that Siemens will soon go public with two broad, aggressive initiatives in
DSPs.
First, Siemens has licensed a U.S. company that Mr. Schumacher declined to name to
manufacture products based on its new, dedicated DSP architecture. Which architecture is being
licensed? Either it is the TriCore 32-bit core, said by the company to combine control and DSP
functions, and therefore would fit into an exploding market that Texas Instruments and Analog
Devices have targeted (EN, Outlook 1998, Jan. 5).
Or more likely, according to Will Strauss, the leading DSP analyst, the architecture licensed is a
communications-targeted DSP architecture which Siemens developed along with I.C. Com, Ltd.,
of Azor, Israel. Mr. Strauss said this DSP has high enough performance for wireless base station
application, as well as GSM handsets. A new DSP in the world market with this type of
performance is sure to bring TI, Motorola and ADI straight up in their chairs.
Second, Siemens is about to either align with or acquire a company that offers DSP-based system
development software. Mr. Schumacher said, as Motorola and ADI have, that the only way to
approach Texas Instruments and its DSPs is to offer the type of development tool support that TI
does.
Mr. Schumacher said he could not say anymore, as the agreements are not signed. Mr. Strauss
ventured that the partner could be Mentor Graphics spin-out Frontier Design, the custom DSP
design software firm of Leuven, Belgium. Frontier's products allow designers, particularly wireless
phone makers, to use DSP cores and then design circuitry around them to their own needs, and
this is similar to what TI does for Nokia and Ericsson, Mr. Strauss said.
Herman Becka, GM of Frontier Design, said Friday from Belgium that the company had sold its
software to Siemens, but did not indicate there was a further relationship in the works. Frontier is
25 percent-owned by Siemens digital cellular phone competitor Philips.
In an interview last week as Siemens and Motorola unveiled their Semiconductor 300 joint
venture (see story, page 2), Andreas von Zitzewitz, president, Memory Products division, said
that Siemens' strategy is to keep DRAMs at about a third of Semiconductor revenues, and this
means increasing the potential of its other products. Because DRAM prices dropped so severely
last year, Signal Processing products became 25 percent of the business' revenues, and this
necessitated a closer look.
Messrs. von Zitzewitz and Schumacher, as everyone but TI does now, emphasized that they do
not want to offer general purpose DSPs. The concentration will be specific markets and
programmable DSPs.
In this, Siemens would start to make semiconductors that come closest to what a large part of the
rest of the company does: communications systems. A spokeswoman with Siemens
Semiconductor in Cupertino, Calif., said the company was not ready to detail these agreements
yet. |
