At one time, reference
designs were simply helpful
guides to the finer
details of designing a part
into a board. Those days
are long gone. The complexity
of today’s devices,
in addition to the fast pace
of many markets, has forced some reference designs
to evolve beyond educational tools into manufacturing
documentation for fully defined end products
(Fig. 1). This dual role leaves semiconductor vendors
struggling to add application expertise to their chip
design efforts.
“In the old days, a reference design was just that—
a reference,” says Tony Valentino, chief operating
officer of QuickFilter Technologies (Fig. 2). “You
looked at it for learning, then went on to do your
own design.” But the educational role of a reference
design began taking a back seat to a new role: becoming
a blueprint for end-product manufacturing.
“We still have customers that use these designs as
true references, taking our basic circuits and modifying
them,” says Valentino. “But now we have customers
that take them literally and build our designs
just as they are.”
Semiconductor vendors across all industries report
the same phenomenon. Reference designs have had
to become product designs, complete with schematics,
board layout files, bills of
material, software, and test
procedures. Developers seek
such complete designs from
their semiconductor vendors
for many reasons, including
the growing complexity of
today’s chips.
“Today, we build systems
on a chip,” says Deepak
Prakash, director of marketing
at Toshiba America
Electronics Corp. “There is
not much left after that to design in. Also, these chips
are so complex that no one outside of the company
can understand them as well as we do.”
Ken Lowe, vice president of strategic marketing
at Sigma Designs, agrees. “Some of our chips are
pushing 7 million gates, with over 1000 registers and
900 pins. The hardware and software are so complex
that it is almost impossible to design with them from
scratch,” Lowe says (Fig. 3).
While chips have become more complex, customer
design expertise seems to have shifted away from
board-level details. “The culture has changed in a lot
of companies,” says Valentino. “Design engineers
are more system-level now and don’t design from
the ground up anymore. They look for ready-made
designs to drop into their systems.”
Design time has also become a factor, especially
in the fast-paced consumer electronics market.
Engineers cannot afford the time required to learn the
details of a new part and incorporate it into a design
when new product variations must continually appear
to address rapid obsolescence. “Companies in markets
such as DVD players need to get products in and
out within a year,” says Lowe, “so they have to go
from reference designs straight into production. They
can’t add engineering and keep to schedule.”
NEW TECHNOLOGIES NEED FULL SUPPORT
But it’s not just chips for consumer products that
need the support of full-product reference designs.
Semiconductor companies are also finding that fullproduct
designs are important when jumpstarting any
market. “To introduce new technology and enable
new markets quickly,” says Sujata Neidig, product
manager for audio DSPs at Freescale Semiconductor
(Fig. 4), “we need full designs.”
Mario Aleo, division manager for bipolar, IGBT,
and RF at STMicroelectronics, feels the same way.
“Customers use full reference designs as development
kits to understand the potential of new technologies.
They also serve as prototypes for testing
options and for quick development,” he says.
These many factors have turned full-production
reference designs into an essential element of product
support for semiconductor vendors, sometimes more
important than the product itself. “Customers are
making their design decisions based on the reference
design, not the chip,” says Lowe. “The assumption
is that the reference design brings the full power of
the chip out.”
“More and more, our product is being judged
on how well the reference design performs,” says
Valentino. And, this demand for fully optimized and
production-ready reference designs places a huge
burden on semiconductor vendors.
One important part of that burden is the design
effort that’s required. “Sometimes we have more
engineers doing the reference designs than we have
doing the original chip,” says Prakash. “In our group,
we have as many board and software designers as
chip designers.”
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