By Ted Vucurevich
Monday, October 29, 2007
Today's relentlessly competitive wireless market and shrinking product lifecycles place a premium on product differentiation. "Me too" products don't win market share. Success comes with product designs that offer better performance, unprecedented features and longer runtimes in smaller, sleeker form factors.
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Ted Vucurevich
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So it isn't surprising that, to meet customer needs, equipment manufacturers, operators and content providers are constantly stretching their resources to deliver increasing performance levels at a dizzying pace. In the process, we've seen unfortunate cases of cell phone designs that have experienced some setbacks. Motorola's RAZR handset offers a timely example. When a faulty component recently caused phones to arbitrarily disconnect calls and reboot, AT&T and T-Mobile were forced to temporarily pull handsets off the shelves. This example illustrates the ripple effect that one faulty wireless component can have throughout the wireless value chain. Unfortunately, because wireless carriers are in direct contact with the consumer, they often bear the brunt of these types of design mishaps.
What can handset makers do to keep up with the rapidly changing needs of consumers, while ensuring the delivery of flawless handset designs to wireless carriers? The answer requires us to take a deeper look inside the handset; specifically at the integrated circuits (ICs) that lie at the heart of all functionality.
Rising Risk
Leading semiconductor companies are creating a range of wireless chips that combine mixed-signal digital and baseband analog functions along with multimedia so that consumers can listen to MP3 audio, access the Internet, record and watch video and take high-resolution digital photos. This wide array of new applications has caused the complexity of IC design to skyrocket.
But as IC designers continue to add new functions to the mix, predictability of the design is increasingly difficult to achieve. Traditional design processes have become more fragmented and verifying that the IC will perform as expected is precarious at best and often ineffective. More often than not, IC designers must resort to manual processes to deal with the signal integrity issues that invariably arise when one integrates analog and digital functions. For example, the mixed- signal/radio frequency (RF) component of a handset design only makes up 5% to 10% of the chip, but is often responsible for more than 50% of silicon re-spins and an unknown number of product rollout delays. Highly complex chip designs also complicate the process of simulating a chip's performance before it is fabricated, making it increasingly difficult for designers to identify where potential problems lie.
Simplifying Technology Adaptation
Given this environment, what are wireless IC designers to do? Clearly, they can't afford to spend large portions of their precious time optimizing their design flow or learning how to use new design tools. They need new tools and technologies that can help them meet crushing time-to-market pressures by allowing them to quickly ramp up their design infrastructure and achieve more predictable results. They need not only the right technologies, but tool vendors that can work with them hand-in-hand to help solve their problems.
The Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry can help by leveraging a broad knowledge of IC design tool technology and deep expertise in applications to supply wireless IC designers with more customized solutions which help designers achieve greater predictability and reliability with their IC designs, at a much quicker pace. How? First, by identifying the key challenges a wireless IC designer faces. Then, by packaging tried-and-true methodologies into a comprehensive suite of IC design tools, platform flows and standardized IP and demonstrating those capabilities on a representative reference design. Imagine a designer working on an IC for the next competitor to Apple's iPhone. The designer is grappling with audio codecs, wireless LAN and Bluetooth devices, a baseband controller with supporting memory, I/O controllers and other functions. Time is clearly critical; the market will not wait. But one fault can destroy any market momentum the handset manufacturer and service provider are attempting to build.
What if he or she had the tools, platform flows and IP needed to quickly integrate voice, video and MP3 functions and a proven reference design for achieving that goal? And what if the EDA vendor could help the designer quickly map those methodologies to the designer's specific needs? The designer could produce a fully verified system-on-chip (SoC) or multichip solution for the new handset in less time and with less risk of failure. And those advantages could then trickle down the entire production chain.
The complexity of IC design is clearly here to stay. Invariably, users will demand new functions and higher performance that will lead to even greater integration, verification and simulation challenges. We believe by taking a new, more customized approach to wireless IC design, the EDA industry can help IC designers and the entire wireless supply chain reduce the risk of failure in IC design and, in the process, allow engineers to tap the creativity and imagination that will lead to exciting new product innovations.
Vucurevich is senior vice president and chief technology officer of Advanced Research & Development for Cadence Design Systems.