For the high product volumes that these companies would be designing for, the key goal is production cost, and the software base is secondary, as long as it doesn't harm time to market.
Don, this is why design wins are so HUGE for companies like TXN, ADI, LU etc. Because companies get "locked in" for quite awhile. And forget about maintain multiple software bases. You must not be a SW engineer <g>. Its just not practical. And time to market is everything. Just look at ERICY now, having missed a product cycle, and been basically bludgeoned by NOKA and QCOM in the phone biz.
At the time of production, a DSP is still a digital IC and will share the cost trends of other processors.
This is true as far as manufacturing costs, and its why companies do shrinks and other tricks to improve yields. But the only real leverage a purchasing department, once a part has been chosen for production, is future consideration. Not exactly like saying I'll just use AMD or Cyrix for my CPU, or Toshiba or NEC for my DRAM/SRAM.
Competition at the design stage is also entails such differentiating factors as feature set (which are far from identical), performance (which is not just a MHZ criteria), and probably most important, the software development environment. Remember, there really are no "canned" apps that are worth much, unlike a general purpose CPU.
Gary |
