Cost used to be something the C-level executive suite dealt with after semiconductors went from design to manufacturing. That approach to making chips is changing, sometimes with unpredictable results.
Money is now a consideration in every step of the process, from architectural design all the way to production, and it will become an even more critical element as chip costs continue to rise with each new lithography node. In some cases, the results of this exercise can prove extremely positive. Companies can save enormous amounts of money and time using a variety of techniques such as re-usable components, derivative designs and at least some programmable features. But things also can go awry with different groups in the design and production process competing for resources and trying to prove their group is the most productive.
Semiconductor companies typically deal with performance, power and cost - three variables that used to be traded off rather loosely when companies developed and produced chips in-house. Now, as the price of developing new chips heads into the stratosphere and more companies outsource their process R&D to foundries - witness the moves by both Texas Instruments and Cypress Semiconductor in the past month - the tradeoffs are being far more tightly managed.
“These are like the pieces of a financial chain,” said Steve Carlson, v-p of marketing at Cadence Design Systems. “There is hard data to show that if you want a 30 per cent increase in performance it will equal a 100 per cent increase in power. But in the design practice, if you over-constrain cost by 30 per cent, that also costs 100 per cent in power.”
Carlson said there is a cause-and-effect relationship between all three elements of the design, but so far the effects of emphasising cost aren’t well understood. And with management now focused on cost savings, the results can be less than expected.
Henry Samueli, co-founder and chief technical officer at Broadcom, said his company began changing its strategy at 130 nanometers because of looming cost increases. “We’re having to make chips more flexible,” Samueli said. “You can’t have fixed-function chips anymore. They have to be programmable and reconfigurable.”
At least part of that approach involves what he calls an “intelligent architecture”, which involves using the same chips for different products. “But there are some limitations to that. It’s an application-specific solution. It may be one cellular chip, but it will not bridge between market segments,” Samueli said.
Broadcom is fabless, but it still retains control of the manufacturing process technology, unlike many other fabless players. Samueli said the company has made a “huge investment” to ensure that its manufacturing processes are portable from one foundry to another - a strategy that IBM, Samsung and Chartered Semiconductor have emphasised with their Common Platform.
FPGAs are another alternative, but the hype about market growth in this space as Asic costs escalate has far outpaced the real growth. Wim Roelandts, president and CEO of Xilinx, said the market actually has grown in certain segments. He said the expansion into consumer electronics has far outpaced the growth in either Asics or ASSPs. But he said the concurrent collapse in the communications market after the dot-com bust masked that growth.
“The rest of the market grew about 30 per cent,” he said. “But the communications market is still down.”
Xilinx executives said the next replacement cycle for communications will be driven by voice over IP and video over IP, which will rekindle demand in the overall FPGA market.
In the meantime, much of the growth also is consumed by ASSPs, which are defined by many companies as Asics that are used for more than one customer. Naveed Sherwani, president and CEO of Open Silicon, said that while the Asic market is now about $20bn, the market for ASSPs is hovering around $60bn annually. While many companies are not abandoning traditional designs for fully programmable chips, the growth in ASSPs shows they are at least looking seriously at other options.