Twelve hundred years ago, Japanese artisans perfected the samurai sword. With a process passed down through the generations from master to apprentice, the samurai sword was the perfect blend of form and function.

The swordsmith employed an elaborate process of heating, and pounding, and folding the steel over and over again. The steel was heated in a kiln fuelled with charcoal which infused the steel with carbon at the molecular level. The smith would remove the sword from the kiln at precisely the right time when its hue had reached the shade of the rising sun.

Such artisan's are not unique in our history. Europeans mastered the art of cathedral-building in the 12th century and violin-making in the 18th. The problem is that the market for samurai swords, cathedrals, and Stradivarius violins is limited. They are boutique goods for small, specialized markets. Artisan design techniques do not lend themselves to being competitive in commodity markets.

Americans have a much shorter history than our cousins in Europe and Japan, and are not well-known for their artisan crafts. Our innovations have been decidedly more mundane and practical. Henry Ford famously said that customers could have his $850 (in 1908) Model T cars "in any colour they wanted as long as it was black." Consumers didn't seem to mind and voted for cost over style. Ford may have also written the world's first marketing requirements document:

I will build a car for the great multitude. It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for. It will be constructed of the best materials, by the best men to be hired, after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise. But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one - and enjoy with his family the blessing of hours of pleasure in God's great open spaces.

Ford achieved his vision and changed the landscape of America forever. He had focused not on building an elegant and beautiful car for the elite - he went after the mass market, discovering a price-elasticity in the market that had escaped the notice of his many competitors.

In fact, Ford went on to cut the price of the Model T over the years until finally reaching $300 by the end of its production in 1927.

Sound like the semiconductor business? Let's compare using Henry's requirements as a baseline:

I will build a car for the great multitude. 
For semiconductor: We are going for the mass market.

It will be large enough for the family, but small enough for the individual to run and care for.
For semiconductor: We are going for a product that targets multiple markets.

It will be constructed of the best materials
For semiconductor: We will have the best quality.

by the best men to be hired,
For semiconductor: Quality is not only about materials, it's about the skill of the team putting it together.

after the simplest designs that modern engineering can devise.
For semiconductor: It will be not over-engineered. The simplest possible design is required.

But it will be low in price that no man making a good salary will be unable to own one
For semiconductor: It will be affordable in price.

There is no doubt that Henry pulled off this feat. The question is, how he did this, and again I think we can find history instructive. Ford pulled off the Model T success with a combination of creativity and leveraging innovations of the previous century:

• The concept of interchangeable parts enabled a value chain of suppliers to compete and thereby commoditize the subcomponents needed. A large market would attract willing suppliers. The concept of interchangeable parts was first introduced in Sweden in the 1700's and later made it way into Eli Whitney's cotton gin and Oliver Winchester's repeating rifle that "won the West".

• The innovation of an assembly line for mass production of vehicles in factories versus the medieval cottage industry approach that emigrated from Europe to America with its early settlers.

• The adoption of Frederick Taylor's theories on "scientific management", where workers specialized in certain tasks along the assembly line.

For us now in the present, our challenge is to similarly "stand on the shoulders of giants" to elevate our industry to the next level and it may follow very closely to the winning recipe of Henry Ford.

In semiconductor parlance, interchangeable parts are IP. The widespread adoption of IP reuse is essential to the smooth operation of the assembly line. We cannot be artisans building boutique IP; instead we most focus on building high quality components which can be leveraged across different "vehicles".

Quality is essential, and not only in terms of functional quality, but as Ford stated in his requirements document, "by the best men", which means we employ the best people. Notice that Ford did not say "by the least expensive men".

Mark Twain wrote, "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." The question is who will be the Henry Ford of semiconductor?

Warren Savage, President and CEO of IPextreme, is a well-known and published authority in the field of semiconductor intellectual property.

He has a long history of pushing the envelope of design methodology from his work in fault tolerant computing at Tandem Computers in the 1980's and driving reliable design methodologies into commercial practice at Synopsys for its DesignWare IP product in the 1990s. Much of his thinking became embodied in the seminal book on IP reuse, the Reuse Methodology Manual.

Previous columns

(Nov 07) Warren Savage On: Making the Case for Invented Here

(Dec 07) Warren Savage On: Swiss Cheese Solutions

(Jan 08) Warren Savage On: Collaboration Needed for Success

(Feb 08) Warren Savage On: Knowing Your No

(Mar 08) Warren Savage On: The Next Big Thing

(Apr 08) Warren Savage On: Gumming Up the Works?

(May 08) Warren Savage On: Waiting for Godot

(June 08) Warren Savage On: Our Virtual Future

(July 08) Warren Savage On: Being Plugged In

(August 08) Warren Savage On: The Dog Days of Summer

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