Excellent article, Jock. A few comments...
According to industry watchers, the Milpitas, Calif., ASIC supplier has now mastered two of the three fundamental SOC elements: high-performance RISC processors (both ARM and MIPS), and mixed signal. LSI Logic has yet to promote the third SOC component-embedded DRAM...
I thought this was a good explanation of the expertise needed for SOC and why the Japanese mega-corps can't just decide to do SOC because it sounds trendy and be market leaders in it the next week. It's nice to see this validated in the Playstation II, although we're just at the very beginning of what SOC will be.
Since 1995, LSI Logic has transformed itself from a designer primarily of gate arrays into one of the top three suppliers of standard-cell ASICs. And of the company's $1 billion standard-cell ASIC revenue last year, as much as 40% was derived from mixed-signal designs, said Jones. "That's a good achievement for a company that five years ago was not even in mixed signal," he said.
Gate arrays to mixed signal--that's quite a change, and in the right direction, I might add.
Regards,
G.P. |
