[DSP in Electronic Times]
Has this been posted? If so, it's worth a repeat:
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From Page One of Electronic News: January 5, 1998 Issue
Outlook 1998--DSPs
New Applications Push Out Other Silicon
By Will Wade and Gale Morrison
Mountain View, Calif.--If it's got silicon inside, there's the potential to use a digital signal processor (DSP). That's the news from the DSP market, where the trend for 1998 is pretty much the same as it was in 1997: more and more applications for the technology, often running better and costing less than traditional silicon products.
This year, DSPs will make further inroads into replacing microcontrollers, especially in motor control applications. Sales of programmable DSPs, offering flexibility to OEMs and easy upgrades for end-users, are also expected to grow strongly. Overall, the DSP industry is facing a promising year, and total growth is expected to beat the total semiconductor growth figures.
"The history of the DSP is of seeing the technology spread from expert users to diffuse through the mainstream markets," said Mike Hames, VP of the semiconductor group and worldwide DSP manager for Texas Instruments. "We think the DSP market is going through the same process that the microprocessor market went through five to 10 years ago."
Will Strauss, president of DSP market research firm Forward Concepts, agrees that the future of DSP is to be found in emerging applications. "New applications are always the big issue in this business." Some of the hot markets include digital cameras, medical imaging, communications, sensors, motor control and home appliances. But Mr. Strauss noted that this is just the tip of the iceberg and people come up with new ideas almost every day. One of his recent favorite DSP ideas uses the technology for detecting buried plastic land mines. "Not a huge volume device, but very useful," Mr. Strauss pointed out.
He predicts overall growth of about 30 percent for DSPs this year, and a five-year cumulative growth rate of nearly 36 percent. Unit shipments were up 52 percent in 1997, although prices were down 17 percent partly because of tight pricing in the DRAM market and strong competition in some of the major DSP segments.
For the moment, DSP applications are limited more by imagination than by the technology, and people are dreaming up new applications every day. TI has spent the past year refocusing its entire corporate strategy towards DSP, and is clearly the dominant force in the industry. The company made two major investments last year to push the rest of the world toward DSP technology, a $100 million venture capital fund for DSP startup companies and a $25 million university fund to support educational efforts in the DSP arena.
Growth Rates Of 40%
Mr. Hames said programmable DSPs could see growth rates of up to 40 percent per year for the next five years. Part of this comes from electronic devices which can be upgraded through software. A prime example of this is 56 kilobit-per-second modems, all of which will be adapted to meet the International Telecommunication Standard which is expect to be approved early next month.
A less obvious application for programmable DSPs is household appliances which allow OEMs to design several different models using a single DSP-based platform. DSPs are already beginning to replace standard microcontrollers for motor control, and Mr. Hames said this will continue to be a hot market. "This is not the sexiest business area, but there are 10 to 20 billion motors made every year and this is an area to make a lot of money," he said. "To me, boring is beautiful."
Cheaper And Better With A DSP
Not only are DSPs driving new markets, they are also being positioned as replacement parts, especially for microcontrollers. "People are finding a lot of things you can do with a microcontroller can be done cheaper and better with a DSP," said Mr. Strauss.
One result of DSPs' versatility is that DSP cores are being embedded into numerous other chips, said Irving Gold, VP of marketing and sales at DSP Group. "People are starting to recognize the value of DSP," he said, "and we will eventually see DSP cores on other chips."
Adding DSP blocks to microprocessors and microcontrollers adds more capabilities to the chips, and sometimes is more efficient than adding a dedicated DSP chip to a system, he noted. Some of the areas where he expects to see more embedded DSPs are disk drives, set-top boxes and consumer electronics. DSP Group expects to release its Teak core this year, a follow-up to its Oak line; and its next generation Palm core is due in early 1999.
Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) is another company that, along with TI, targets the general purpose DSP market. The company competes with TI in every DSP market, a spokesman said.
According to Jerry McGuire, manager of the 32-bit "Sharc" line, the competition in the low cost, 32-bit floating point DSP segment will heat up further as ADI will "be doing broad announcements that will define customers and applications across lots of consumer and 'near-consumer' appliances." With this planned 1998 release, ADI will have "a lower cost floating point, 32-bit product competing head-to-head with the low cost floating point offering from TI and with the 24-bit, fixed point DSP from Motorola," he said.
"We see two things going on there," Mr. McGuire said. "There is a lot of competition in that space, and the low cost, floating point side really hasn't seen a new product in a few years. We (ADI) see it as a low cost way to take down the high-end microcontrollers."
The planned new Sharc line will have "significantly more on-chip SRAM than competitors. We're the leader in integrating SRAM on-chip," according to Dave Jackson, ADI's DSP spokesman. On-chip memory is known to be one of the key differentiator among DSPs, because performance slowdowns are often due to getting the signals back and forth between off-chip memory. The ADI product, Mr. McGuire said, "will have significant amounts of DMA and I/O bandwidth," as well.
Overall, DSP prices will continue to come down in 1998. For example, ADI's Mr. McGuire said, "If we look back a year ago, prices were in excess of $100. (In 1997) We introduced some components at sub-$50, and hit a few $30 targets," he said. "We're going into the $10 range" in 1998.
As for 16-bit ADI DSPs, "1998 is going to be an excellent year," Rob DeRobertis, manager of the 16-bit 21xx line at ADI, said. "You'll see the new 16-bit DSPs at the beginning of the year and then a new architecture which we'll be announcing mid-year. You'll also see new packaging technologies to come in 1998 for 16-bit and 32-bit DSPs," he said. And expect more custom DSP spins from ADI to be detailed, similar to the single-chip modem partnership with 3Com that was announced at the end of last year. One such custom chip arrangement will be with a Massachusetts company known as IRE that commissioned ADI for a mixed signal DSP; part of that company's secure data communications strategy, Mr. DeRobertis said.
Mr. McGuire said that the floating point Sharc parts will get a new architecture by mid 1998 as well. All of these are "fruits of the labor and investments that were put in place well over a year ago," he said, under the guidance of David French, VP/GM for DSP, and Bob Conrad, who is ADI's DSP director.
The DSP from ADI that is to hit the $10 price point in 1998 is one suitable for an apparently up-and-coming application. The component will be the 2186 in Mr. DeRobertis' line, a 16-bit DSP with 16KB SRAM.
Mobile Phone Boom
A DSP of this type "is finding itself in 'hands-free' car kits in the mobile phone area," Mr. DeRobertis said, a market both ADI and SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM) (with its D950 core and ST18952 DSP) see booming in 1998 and after. "From our cursory analysis, we're the leader in that market," Mr. DeRobertis said.
SGS-Thomson's Bob Krysiak also brought up the surprising number of DSPs going into 'hands-free' car phone kits as well. Mr. Krysiak is group VP for the 32/64-bit microprocessor division of STM, which has a development center in Bristol, England and covers STM's DSP work.
Both STM and ADI are watching legislation, particularly in the European countries, that mandates that all new car telephones be equipped with one of these kits, which accomplish speech recognition most cost effectively with a DSP. Messrs. DeRobertis, McGuire and Krysiak said that U.S. legislation covering the kits is not far off.
ADI too is taking aim at the microcontroller-replacement market in white goods: refrigerators, dishwashers, washing machines with a second generation of DSP counterparts to the microcontrollers that dominate the high volume motor control segment now. ADI's Transportation and Industrial Products division plan a big rollout of this DSP core-based, mixed signal technology in the first half of the year.
Lucent In The Mix Too
Lucent Technologies Microelectronics concentrates its DSP work in its logical strength: communications applications. James Boddie, director for technology development in Lucent's Wireless and Multimedia business unit, said a large part of his division's work in 1998 will be finding applications for the Lucent 16000 DSP generation that the company rolled out in the fall.
The first product in that family, the "16210 is sampling and is out to customers for development systems," Mr. Boddie said. Volume production is expected next year, because "the production of that device is gated by our customers," he said. "So we're 'holding' until they are ready to receive production quantities. The 16210 is more directed at communications infrastructure applications, this first one is a device that has a lot of RAM."
Both Lucent and ADI saw healthy volumes in GSM mobile phones in 1996 and into 1997, but analysts termed the market "sluggish" as 1997 closed out. Lucent knew the 16000 DSPs had to be designed with all of the major wireless telecommunication standards in mind, particularly CDMA, if they were to sell in 1998, he said.
In addition, Both Texas Instruments and Analog Devices made significant overtures in ADSL technology market in the last months of 1997. According to a Lucent Technologies spokesman, that company intends to enter the ADSL space in the first half of this year.
Mr. Boddie said Lucent is working to get the 16210 core, known as "Sabre," into system-on-chip designs, meaning those with on-chip memory and central processing.>>> |
