As much as we'd like to think engineering is all
about innovation, the essence of the profession
often comes down to answering three questions: Who is the customer, what does it want,
and how am I going to do it? As a result, interactions between designers and customers tend to
define our goals and tasks.
OEMs, IDMs, And IDHs, Oh My!
Consumer products dominate today's analog/mixed-signal chip market, and most of
the customers are Asian original equipment
manufacturers (OEMs). What's hard to decipher is how that situation affects analog designers around the world.
Industry is evolving as Far East universities graduate more
of their own engineers and experienced engineers return to
their native countries to start design centers. Meanwhile, Western companies are acquiring overseas design centers
while Asian OEMs change their product focus from cost-driven
to branded models.
The simplistic view is that analog independent device manufacturers (IDMs) are making it easier for Asian OEMs to simply
drop parts onto a board and have them work. Their "reference
designs" are really complete application-specific subsystems
that the IDM will even tweak if necessary to fit the OEMs' needs.
In practice, however, it's more complicated.
For one thing, says Analog Devices' John Hussey, the IDM seldom deals directly with the OEM these days. In the middle, an
independent design house (IDH) writes the specs for the IDM at
the behest of the OEM and validates and verifies the IDM's product. And while there are many IDHs in China and a growing number in India, companies like S3 Silicon and Software Systems
compete successfully from as far away as Dublin, Ireland.
Reference Designs
National Semiconductor, Altera, and MoreThanIP, a German IDH, collaborated on a reference design for a media
access controller for an IEEE 1588 industrial-control implementation. It incorporates National's
physical-layer transceivers with MoreThanIP's
1588 MAC core implemented in an Altera FPGA.
Rick Zarr of National Semiconductor contrasts such reference designs with the old-fashioned way of producing a design within a company, investing one or two years in R&D, and
then spinning modifications off that design for
several years thereafter. "What we're doing," he
says, "is taking that year or two of development,
wrapping it up in a box, and handing it to them."
For the most part, Zarr says these reference
designs aren't canned solutions. They're more
like examples of how a design should be
approached, or something that establishes a
baseline performance with which the customer
can compare its designs. Even when companies ship reference designs with Gerber tapes
for the circuit boards, it's rare that the routing is
copied exactly.
"We provide the Gerbers as an example of how
to route critical sections and not do bad things
like running the sense line under the inductor in a
power supply," says Zarr. "As long as they take
routing hints from the reference, odds are they'll
be successful."