Technology News
PCs Shouldn't Be At Center Of
Chip Strategies
(09/29/98 2:19 p.m. ET)
By Anthony Cataldo, EE Times
Superior process technology and a strong presence in the
PC market no longer guarantee good profits for
semiconductor suppliers in Japan, according to Thomas
Engibous, CEO of Texas Instruments, speaking in Tokyo
on Monday.
Calling digital signal processors "the single most
important opportunity in semiconductors today," Engibous
said chip companies must shift away from a reliance on
technology in a country where electronics companies
consider process technology to be their very soul.
"Quite a bit of interest has been focused on the
technology, and that's critical. But just as important but
much harder to get is the software that is embedded on
the silicon," said Engibous, who made his comments at a
rollout of TI's latest C54X Digital Signal Processors.
Moreover, Engibous said the PC market will give way to
new "digital connectivity" applications as the mainstay of
the semiconductor business. "In the past, the
semiconductor industry was driven by the PC primarily.
However, future growth will be driven by digital
connectivity, such as networking and wireless
communications," he said. "All digital cell phones have a
DSP, and both ends of the network connection have a
DSP. And already more digital cell phones are sold than
PCs. This year alone, more than 140 million digital cell
phones will be sold around the world."
After two years of restructuring and a shift to focus on
DSPs and analog products, TI is up to the task, Engibous
said. The company has made nine acquisitions and more
than a dozen divestitures to get into its present shape.
The realignment will reach closure when TI completes
the sale of its Dynamic RAM business to Micron
Technology. Engibous defended TI's exit from the
DRAM market, saying it protects the company from the
cyclical pattern of the memory business.
And DRAMs no longer drive
process technology advances,
Engibous said. "That was true
seven to 10 years ago, but
DRAM and logic have been
diverging for 10 years," he said.
"Memory optimizes the storage
of capacitors in a small area.
Logic optimizes interconnect.
These two are incompatible.
That's why R&D groups at
most companies has been
separated."
TI's strategy has already paid
off, Engibous said. "In a year when most of the
semiconductor industry is facing slow or negative growth,
DSP sales are expected to increase 20 percent," he said.
He attributed this growth to the high demand for
real-time processing applications, and to the usefulness of
DSPs in "thousands" of products.
With the brunt of its realignment complete, TI must now
make sure that the rate of growth does not flag for
DSPs. The company has set about the time-consuming
task of building a base of software programming tools,
and of enlarging the number of DSP programmers inside
and outside TI. Indeed, Engibous called software
development "the most important strategic activity at TI
right now.
"What we are doing will revolutionize the DSP industry
and pave the way for faster growth of new DSP
applications," he said. "Technology makes you a
participant in the DSP market, software wins the game.
We believe the company that wins in the number of
installed-base software programmers wins the market.
"TI has set out to assist those programmers by
developing a software infrastructure that cuts
development time and cost, while allowing designers to
focus on what makes their product unique," he continued.
"Look at it this way: If you're building a house, you don't
try to recreate the electrical or telephone systems. But in
effect, that's what DSP programmers have had to do up
to today.
"There hasn't been a standard infrastructure to build our
new products. It's critical to reduce the development cost
and complexity for a designer's job. We'll do that by
developing a stable, pervasive and open infrastructure,"
he said.
For example, even while TI reports vigorous
development activity for high-end C6X DSPs, Engibous
said the company's customers have yet to take full
advantage of C-compilers when programming the very
long instruction word device. "People are compiling in C,
but to optimize the memory or for speed-intensive
functions, they're using assembly language," he said in
comments following his speech.
One reason for that is the dearth of DSP software
developers. Engibous said that must change. TI
(company profile) now has 300 people internally working
to create software tools, and about the same number
outside of TI are doing the same, Engibous said. There
are 30,000 designers writing software for DSPs,
Engibous estimated. He would like to see that number
climb to "hundreds of thousands," but there needs to be
more software programmers to meet that goal, he said.
And that's a key reason for TI's sponsorship of DSP
training at 900 universities worldwide, he added.
"The math is simple -- the more people we have
developing DSP software, the more designers we'll
need," he said. "More DSP designers means more
products for DSP applications."
Engibous also touted TI's market leadership in analog and
mixed-signal technology, calling it a key area ripe for
growth that will complement TI's DSP business. The
company has substantially increased its development
efforts, and will double the number of products it
introduces this year over last year, he said. And that
number will double again next year, he said.
"Having a broad analog product mix is critical to serving
the many different applications that our DSPs support,
and it supports our customers' needs," he said.
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