TI offers parts as rivals nip at its heels
By Stephan Ohr and Robert Ristelhueber
(10/25/99, 2:26 p.m. EDT)
DALLAS— Stealing a march on the DSP World show in Orlando, Fla.,
next week (Nov.1- 4), Texas Instruments Inc. will bulk up the high end of
its digital signal processor family with new parts using very long instruction
word techniques. The latest DSPs come at a time of heady growth for the
DSP leader, despite a rising number of competitors nipping at its heels.
TI last week reported a 25 percent jump in DSP revenue in the third
quarter, enabling it to blow past analysts' profit forecasts. Booming cell
phone markets in particular benefited the company; TI's total revenue grew
13 percent from a year ago despite the divestiture of the DRAM business.
And showing that it doesn't plan to sit on its lead, TI is introducing its
TMS320C6204 and C205 this week, bringing its current VLIW offerings
to eight-all before the competition has effectively gotten their first designs
out the door.
In the VLIW space, TI faces competition from StarCore, the Lucent
Technologies and Motorola joint technology venture based in Atlanta. Like
the TI C6000 series, the StarCore SC140, disclosed in the spring, uses a
very long instruction word to control parallel hardware resources and to
ensure multiple executions per clock cycle. But StarCore's designers claim
they have managed a tighter coupling between the compiler and judiciously
chosen hardware resources, resulting in a tighter code space and lower
power consumption than the TI processors.
More recently, Motorola introduced its implementation of the StarCore
SC140. The MSC8101 includes both a network communications
processor module (a 32-bit RISC engine that handles ATM and Ethernet
network packet protocols), and PowerPC interface. The device, which is
not expected to ship until the second quarter of 2000, is clearly targeted at
basestation applications.
But TI seems unfazed. "We own the 3G basestation market-eight of the top
10 basestation suppliers are working with us," said Rick Rinehart, the
C6000 product line manager. TI has introduced eight C6x products in two
years, and judging by the sales of development tools (particularly linkers),
TI believes there are currently about 4,000 developers working on
C6000-based projects. That amounts to some $1.4 billion worth of
design-ins.
Bus interfaces
The current introductions give the C6000 new bus interfaces, and is
compatible with other devices in a multiprocessor system. The C6205, for
example, has an on-chip PCI interface. This should make it useful for
ADSL and G.Lite decoding on the client side (where PCs are used), said
Rinehart. The C6204, meanwhile, adds a dual bus interface. Both devices
will produce up to 1,600 Mips with 200-MHz clock, and will sample in the
second quarter of 2000.
The C6204 is pin and code compatible with the earlier C6202, a
2,000-Mips device with 3 Mbits (384 kbytes) of SRAM, and the 6203, a
2,400-Mips device with 7 Mbits (896 kbytes) of SRAM. The design issue
with these fast processors is making sure they are fed, said Rinehart. The
C6204's dual 32-bit buses provide a data transfer rate of 400
Mbytes/second.
The C6211 had solved the data/instruction flow problem-and saved
on-chip memory and costs—by using L1 and L2 caches to trick the
processor into believing it had a larger local memory space. Performance
was rated at 1,200 Mips, and costs ranged from $20 to $40. The
introductions (with 1,600 Mips) are expected to sell for $30 to $70.
Besides StarCore, TI faces the looming threat of Intel Corp., which formed
a joint DSP venture with Analog Devices Inc. earlier this year, and more
recently struck a deal to acquire DSP Communications Inc. for $1.6 billion.
Intel's shift is dramatic, noted Will Strauss, who heads the market research
firm Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.). "DSP was a four-letter word at
Intel for many years," he said. "They saw programmable DSP as competing
[with microprocessors]." But with PC growth slowing, and the digital
wireless market booming, Intel has changed its tune, Strauss said.
He expects Lucent will introduce a chip based on the SC140 as early as
next month. "And Motorola is getting more aggressive pursuing the DSP
market outside of its own use, mostly in basestations."
"Let's face it, TI is in a lot of people's crosshairs," said Joseph Osha, vice
president for corporate strategy and research at Merrill Lynch (New
York). But he doesn't expect the Intel-ADI partnership to bear fruit until
some time next year. In the meantime TI is building on its lead, now
approaching 50 percent of the DSP market.
In the third quarter, TI had revenue of $2.39 billion, up from $2.11 billion
the year before. Operating margin was 19.9 percent, excluding special
charges, up from 9.6 percent the year before, mainly due to the absence of
losses from the divested memory business. Quarterly net income was $420
million, up from $164 million a year ago, excluding special charges largely
arising from that sale.
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