More on Matsushita, MSFT's PC-TV partner.................
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Matsushita clear in its system-on-a-chip focus
By David Lammers
TOKYO - With its semiconductor operation joined at the hip to the digital
consumer systems future, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. may be the
dark horse in the system-on-a-chip race.
Efforts to develop a single-chip DVD controller are particularly interesting,
because they pit Japanese competitors such as Matsushita, Hitachi and
Toshiba against chip makers that are not tightly linked with the DVD
hardware consortium, such as Cirrus Logic, LSI Logic and others.
Matsushita completed a 10-piece DVD chip set in 1996, followed by a
second-generation chip set with five ICs in 1997. The latter set consisted of
a servo DSP, an MCU, an MPEG-2 decode chip with built-in
copy-protection circuitry, a 4-Mbit DRAM with error-correction control
and a front-end servo chip with the read channel and preamplification
functions.
Matsushita now has working silicon for a two-piece DVD chip set. It
expects to finish that generation of the chip set later this summer and put it
on the market.
Like other companies, Matsushita has reorganized its chip operation around
specific design targets, said Susumu Koike, director of Matsushita's
semiconductor development division.
"It was easier for Matsushita to reorganize, compared with companies like
NEC, because we didn't invest so heavily in our own memory or
microprocessor designs," Koike said. "That way, more of our resources can
be devoted to designing system LSIs for specific applications."
Koike preaches the merits of focus. "We have put a clear focus on our
stronger areas, where Matsushita's system knowledge is strong," he said.
"Rather than doing everything, from now on we plan to focus on certain
system LSIs." DVD is high on the list.
Shinichi Yasugi, who is in charge of designing the servo device for the
upcoming DVD chip set, said keeping the front-end processor a separate
device makes sense for the foreseeable future. The analog read-channel
functionality is best met with a bipolar process, he said, while tipping his hat
to Cirrus Logic's ability to do quality analog in CMOS. Cirrus plans to
leverage CMOS analog expertise derived from its Crystal products division
(Austin, Texas) to deliver a true single-chip implementation, combining the
read-channel portion of DVD with the drive-control logic and MPEG-2
decode functionality. (Hitachi will keep its read-channel IC in a BiCMOS
process for the time being.)
"With a bipolar implementation of the read channel, we have a better chance
at minimizing jitter," Yasugi said. The shift to 3x and 4x speeds within the
DVD market will happen quickly, he said, making a separate servo device
the best option for now. By contrast, Matsushita is planning a single-chip,
all-CMOS design in the DVD-RAM market, he added.
One chip or two?
Koike said that the "ultimate direction" is a single-chip implementation,
starting with the computer-use DVD drives. For portable DVD players,
where power consumption is an important design criterion, a one-chip
design is also best. But in the consumer market, where various companies
will use different types of optical pickups, it makes more sense to keep the
front-end processor separate so that it can be tuned to the various
mechanisms, he argued.
In terms of quality of the video playback image, the Matsushita
implementation claims to be superior in signal stability, special effects and
what Koike termed a "sharp, clean" signal even in a noisy system
environment.
"Our mission is to fulfill the maximum system performance possible," he said,
with cost being another challenge. In a fast-moving market like DVD, a
two-chip implementation makes it easier to keep the rapidly changing
portion of the design on its own mask set. A five-mask change can cost
$250,000 in the quarter-micron generation.
These kinds of trade-offs are becoming complex, particularly with the ability
to add DRAM or analog to a basic logic design. A portable DVD chip set
might put a DRAM block on-chip, for example. "By embedding the
DRAM, power consumption goes down by one-third, and that is important
for the portable DVD market," Koike said. |
