Bradley W. Price
I too am looking forward to the era of broadband wireless. The potential for interconnectivity of mobile as well as fixed point is huge. With the tremendous emphasis being placed fy the market on embedded dsp chips in everything from dishwashers other home appliances, autos, pcs, etc the notion that anyone will be able to contol the funtioning of his stuff from anywhere is not too far off.
eet.com
EE Times
Posted: 5/27/98
DSP chips thrive despite price declines
By Will Strauss, President
Forward Concepts
TEMPE, Ariz. ‹ The DSP chip market continues its robust growth, in spite
of continued sluggishness in the overall integrated circuit market. In
1997, the value of DSP chip shipments was up a strong 33.6 percent to
$3.2 billion, bucking the 4 percent growth of all ICs (excluding
discretes) that year. That compares quite well to the performance of the IC market in general, which suffered heavily from the decline in DRAM prices that was brought on by industry overcapacity. The result was a drop of 15 percent in the average selling price of an IC.
But it wasn't all blue skies for DSPs. They also suffered price
declines, brought on primarily by severe competition in for sales in the technology's three biggest markets: digital wireless, modems and hard disk drives. So even as unit shipments increased by a whopping 63
percent to 345 million units, an 18 percent decline in averaging selling price moderated revenues to that $3.2 billion figure. The good news, though, is that new markets for DSP open when chip prices decline.
Texas Instruments continues to lead the programmable DSP market, with a 45 percent market share, followed by Lucent Technologies with 28 percent and Analog Devices and Motorola tied for 12 percent each. The remaining 3 percent includes companies such as NEC and Hitachi, selling mostly in Japan.
Forward Concepts forecasts a healthy, but not spectacular, 30 percent
revenue growth in 1998, tempered by price pressures brought on by a glut of hard disk drives and the economic problems in the Far East. which will slightly dampen the otherwise fast-growing digital wireless market. Europe continues to be the biggest market for digital wireless, with continued strong increases forecast for 1998. As Asia's economic health improves and the Japanese move to wideband CDMA, we expect the Asian digital wireless market to have renewed vigor in another year or so. Digital satellite handsets will become a big market at the turn of the century as will a spate of other new DSP markets such as ADSL, HDTV, Direct Broadcast Audio (DAB) and ac motor control. We predict that be 2001 annual DSP chip market growth will be back up to the 40 percent level, propelling the market to the $14.8 billion level in 2002.
Wireless communication continues to be the biggest market for
programmable DSP chips. Most of those chips are application-specific
standard products (ASSPs) or customized logic around standard DSP cores. That is, they differ from their more generic off-the-shelf cousins in that they are designed specifically for the wireless market and would be unsuitable for, say, disk drive control.
DSP for wireless in all forms is continuing to grow: for digital
cellular worldwide, for personal communication systems (PCS) in the
United States, Personal HandyPhone in Japan and wireless local loop
(WLL) in the more advanced third-world countries, like India and China.
Even the present U.S. analog cellular system ‹ Advanced Mobile Phone
Service (AMPS) ‹ is beginning to employ DSP in new handsets, making it
much easier to construct dual-mode, dual-band units for roaming from
areas where digital is dominant to rural and established areas where
analog wireless remains the universal connection. And smart antennas
based on beam-forming DSP algorithms for signal steering and rejection
of interfering signals is renewing the life of the older AMPS base
stations.
The red-hot 56-kbit/second modem market has become a huge sink for DSP
silicon, both as programmable DSP chips from Analog Devices, Lucent and TI and as fixed-function DSP devices (that we term Fasics and discuss below) from Rockwell International and Cirrus Logic. Unlike the earlier generation of V.fast upgrades to the final V.34 (28.8 kbits/s) modem specification which required chip or board changeouts, virtually all 56-kbit modems will be field-upgradable to the new ITU V.90 specification, as most employ flash memory.
Hard disk drives (HDDs) continue to be a major DSP market, driven
primarily by the personal computer market. With the increased appetite
for information in graphical form and the bloating of office suites
(which include many programs that we'll never use) plus the never-ending downloads from the Internet, PCs are demanding ever-increasing amounts of disk storage. Many PCs now ship with almost a gigabyte of software, and 3.2-Gbyte disks are considered a bare minimum. DSP, in the forms of servo control and as PRML (partial-response, maximum likelihood) read channels, enable dramatically increased packing density of bits on a disk platter.
TI, by acquiring Silicon Systems Inc., expanded its DSP disk controller dominance to also become a force in digital read channel chips, too. However, TI is facing strong competition in this market, especially from Lucent Technologies and Cirrus Logic. Others in the mix include SGS-Thomson, IBM, Motorola, Philips and newcomer Marvell, which landed a major design win at Seagate.
Although disk servo controllers are programmable DSP devices, PRML read channels are largely implemented through state machines ‹ hardwired logic that executes the DSP algorithms, but without stored program control (meaning that a state machine is not a computer). Forward Concepts includes these chips in a class of Function- and
Algorithm-Specific ICs (Fasics) that primarily employ DSP technology,
but are never sold with the "DSP chip" nomenclature, and are not
included in our DSP chip market numbers. However, the market for Fasics is almost twice the size of the programmable DSP chip market.
Fasics are available from more than 80 semiconductor houses that supply DSP-based products, but are not known as DSP chip houses. Most of their offerings are nonprogrammable, and virtually all are sold under non-DSP names, like "modem" chips from Rockwell, MPEG decoders from SGS-Thomson or ADSL chips from GlobeSpan Technologies. Some are programmable (at least by the chip vendor), like C-Cube Microsystems' Video RISC engine for MPEG encoding, Dolby Pro Logic decoders from Medianix Semiconductor or AVP III videoconferencing codecs from Lucent. Others are state machines, like QAM or QPSK cable modulators and demodulators from companies like Broadcom, Rockwell and Stanford Telecom.
Digital versatile disk (DVD) will become a huge sink for DSP engines;
first through a combination of programmable DSPs for 5.1-channel Dolby
AC-3 decoders and Fasic MPEG-2 video decoders. By late 1998, though,
single-chip implementations for both audio and video functions will be
the norm. C-Cube Microsystems and Zoran were the first companies to
announce single-chip DVD decoders. Although there is a degree of
programmability even in these single-chip devices, ultimately hardwired or state-machine implementations will prevail for DVD systems.
DSP is the most embedded of all embedded processors, and the Fall '97
Embedded Systems Conference had about a dozen DSP-centered booths.
Virtually every new MPU and MCU design now incorporates some DSP
capabilities for a very simple reason: soon we will all be talking to
and listening to our computers (we will also see each other via
computers).
Among the programmable DSP chip houses, Analog Devices is the most
aggressive in the AC'97 market space, offering codecs with embedded
modem data pumps and advanced sound chips.
Eventually, Intel will incorporate many DSP functions into its 64-bit
Merced MPU chip, which is due to hit the street in late 1999. The most
widely touted host DSP capability will be the "software modem." But, by then, ADSL and cable modems will be strongly ramping and they will
require external DSP resources. So a very healthy future is predicted
for DSP technology ‹ on an even greater variety of chip platforms.
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