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To: shane forbes who wrote (10756)	3/10/1998 7:40:00 PM
From: Mang Cheng	Respond to of 25814

"Systems On A Chip Call For A Narrow Focus" (03/10/98; 3:41 p.m. EST) By David Lammers, EE Times A stronger focus on specific market segments and a closer working relationship with system designers will become more critical as silicon vendors pursue the system-on-a-chip business. Experts say Japan's application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vendors will have to abandon the idea they can succeed across the entire marketplace, from telecommunications to computers to consumer and automotive. They must learn to say no to customers outside their chosen expertise, said Keiske Yawata, a veteran of LSI Logic's Japan subsidiary and of NEC, and now on the board of several U.S. fabless semiconductor companies. "The pockets of Japanese companies are not so deep anymore," Yawata said. Any successful ASIC must compete against the application-specific standard product (ASSP) solutions of small, fabless companies, which are very narrowly focused. "Japan's top managers are very general in their outlook," Yawata said. "They are not so quick, and their overhead is too high. If they want to do system on chip successfully, those managers have to get better focused on a certain set of end markets -- maybe seven or eight instead of 17 or 18. If you say you want to do system on chip for PDAs [personal digital assistants], then do that very well, and give up something else." "Japanese companies talk about system on chip quite a bit. But what is not very clear is exactly what markets they want to develop for. It is very vague," said Yoshio Nishimuro, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology. The requirement to focus on certain applications will certainly affect U.S. ASIC vendors, as well. But Bruce Beers, director of IBM's ASIC products group, said IBM's customer base is broad, and "it may be too early" to talk about ignoring certain segments in favor of others. For all his talk about application focus, Bob Payne, vice president for strategic directions at VLSI Technology, said the convergence of communications, computers, and consumers requires a silicon vendor be able to use cores from one application in another. Mix and match will help an ASIC vendor attack a greater number of applications. "There is a lot of overlap," he said. "You've got to be able to cover a lot of bases." Even Lucent Technologies, which clearly has a telecommunications focus, doesn't want to let the computer market out of its sights. "We are a major player in mass storage. If you look at it in a certain way, a drive is just another node on the network," said Mark Stibitz, a vice president at Lucent, in Murray Hill, N.J. In Japan, especially, abandoning a business, or a customer, is tough. Japanese semiconductor vendors often work closely with a set of customers and provide a broad range of components, including ASIC support. That vendor-customer bond often keeps major IC vendors from honing their skills in a certain area. "One way Japanese companies say no is to charge a lot of money for the development fee," Yawata said. "That's one way to turn away business you don't want." techweb.com Mang