The GlobalFoundries Enigma
When AMD sought to shed its costly manufacturing unit Ibrahim Ajami saw an interesting opportunity, one that will eventually bring semiconductor manufacturing to Abu Dhabi. Let’s start with the recent interview published with Ajami, the 34 year old Chief Executive Officer of Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC), which is owned by the Government of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and is the controlling shareholder of GlobalFoundries (GFI).
GlobalFoundries wants 30% of the made-to-order chip market within three years. “Am I setting very aggressive targets? Yes,” Ajami said in a Jan 28 interview in Abu Dhabi. “We need to be a $5 billion company in the next two to three years.” A 30% share would take GlobalFoundries well past United Microelectronics Corp (UMC), making it the world’s second-largest contract manufacturer of chips after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC).
Mr. Ajami also dispelled recent rumors: “ATIC won’t buy the rest of GlobalFoundries (AMD owns 34%) and the company has no interest in acquiring either United Micro or South Korea’s Hynix Semiconductor Inc.”, Ajami said. “It doesn’t fit with our strategy right now,” he said. “UMC is another foundry in Taiwan and we’re not looking to go there right now and Hynix is a memory company. Memory is not what we’re focused on right now”.
Ajami earned his BS degree from Northeastern University in Boston in 1998 and his MBA from the University of Southern California in 2004. His semiconductor experience comes from the creation of a Silicon Valley startup called ViralSounds Inc., and he worked for Packard Bell/NEC. Ajami, associate director of the acquisitions unit of Mubadala, was tapped to become CEO of ATIC and led the $7.5 billion acquisitions of AMD manufacturing and Chartered Semiconductor that we now call GlobalFoundries.
As I mentioned in TSMC versus GlobalFoundries Part I and Part II, GFI will compete head-to-head with TSMC in the first source semiconductor market, while UMC and SMIC are content to be second and third source semiconductor manufacturers. GFI has not been shy about their challenge to TSMC’s wafer supremacy and TSMC has responded in kind by increasing capital expenditures, increasing R&D expenses, and hiring thousands of engineers:
DanielNenni TSMC plans record $4.8bn investment http://tinyurl.com/ygxe334 Morris Chang does not see supply exceeding demand
DanielNenni TSMCs R&D expenses rising 25 pct this yr http://tinyurl.com/ylzkk3b R&D to hit $850 million in 2010
DanielNenni TSMC to add 3k+ engineers +13% headcount http://tinyurl.com/yhtmvpp to do battle with Global Foundries
During my January visit to Taiwan there was definitely excitement in the air at TSMC. The Fab lobbies were filled with job applicants, the Fab cafeterias and coffee shops were abuzz, and meetings were much harder to coordinate, a very big change from a few months ago. On a side note, the food in Fab 12 is by far the tastiest and EVA Airlines is the absolute best carrier from the US to Taiwan, but I digress.
Whether or not GFI is a serious threat to TSMC’s foundry supremacy, TSMC is certainly using GFI’s public relations activities to motivate employees. Déjà vu when the deep pockets of the Chinese government funded SMIC. Unfortunately, as it turned out, SMIC was a sheep in wolf’s clothing. GFI on the other hand looks more like a wolf in an Armani suit.
TSMC 28nm Design Advisory
Transistors may be shrinking but atoms are not. Transistors are now just a handful of atoms so it matters even more when a couple of those atoms are out of place. Process variations, whether they are statistical, proximity, or otherwise, have got to be thoughtfully accounted for if we are to achieve the low-power, high-performance, and high yield design goals at 28nm.
A recent seminar by TSMC and Synopsys entitled “32/28nm Challenges – The EDA Vendor and Foundry Perspective” brought perspective to the coming design challenges. The TSMC section presented by Tom Quan is well worth seeing. Tom Quan has 30 years design and product development experience in the AMS market space. You won’t find a more engaging speaker on process variation than Tom Quan.
TSMC’s value proposition for moving to the 28nm process supports Moore’s Law with a better than 2X gate density at 28nm versus 40nm, a significant speed gain, plus reduced power leakage and an overall cost reduction. Target applications for 28nm include high performance computing and peripherals, low power devices such as HD video cameras, mobile internet and mobile computing, home and portable entertainment. TSMC’s Advanced Technology Roadmap is on track for the low power 28nm process in Q210 and high performance-high K metal gate 28nm process in Q310.
Tom Quan’s emphasis on the importance of “Variation-Aware Design” is justified. To start with, a smaller manufacturing window with much less margin to begin with equals more variation. Add to that the fact that global variation is constant, but local variation increases significantly as channel width and length decreases, and you will have a requirement for variation-aware design tools prior to GDS.
The overall TSMC design ecosystem emphasis is on collaboration between design and process. Tom divided this responsibility into Foundry: better SPICE accuracy, DFM rules, providing variation aware reference design kits (RDKs), and restricted design rules (RDRs). Designers: must be aware of layout effects, analyze-fix variation-aware methodologies will be required for area-yield tradeoffs, and pre- vs. post-layout simulation accuracy. The clear implication is that designers need to change their mindset in adopting a variation-aware design methodology as a requirement versus a luxury.
The conclusions are obvious. Partnerships between the foundry, EDA and SemIP providers, and customers will be required to eliminate silicon waste at 28nm. Partnerships that are friendly and cost effective, with shared responsibility will result in productive and innovative solutions to even the most technologically advanced challenges.
I’ve covered semiconductor process variation in my blogs on TSMC Process Variation, TSMC 40nm Yield Explained, Moore’s Law and 40nm Yield, and most recently Moore’s Law and 28nm Yield. I also work on process variation with the foundries and top semiconductor companies through strategic relationships with Solido Design Automation. Device sensitivity and process variability is something you will have to carefully model and design to at 28nm so be sure and look for variation aware methodologies before you start.
Moore’s Law and 28nm Yield
This blog is a follow-up to my second most viewed page Moore’s Law and 40nm Yield, with a strong recommendation of how to design for yield at the advanced nodes (32/28/22nm) with Verify High-Sigma design technology.
In today’s highly competitive semiconductor industry, profitability hinges on high yield, competitive design performance, and rapid time to market. For the designer, this translates to the need to manage diverse variations (global and local process variations, environmental variations, etc.), reconcile yield with performance (power, speed, area, etc.), while under intense time pressures. This is an enormous challenge and it is getting even harder as Moore’s Law hits the advanced process nodes.
Case in point: Circuit blocks such as complex standard cells or memory bit cells are repeated thousands or even millions of times on a die. For the overall chip to have good yield, the repeated block must have extremely high yield. Calculating yield in this context is very important due to increasing process variations at each new technology node.
One approach would be to use Monte Carlo sampling. Unfortunately, this would require far too many simulations: a circuit with 99.9999% yield would need, on average, 1 million samples from the true distribution just to observe a single failure against circuit specifications.
Compared to a plain Monte Carlo simulation, Verify High-Sigma design is orders of magnitude faster for estimating yields of high sigma circuits.
With a normal Monte Carlo run, process points are drawn directly from the process variation distribution. The problem, as noted earlier, is that far too many samples are needed in order to get failures in the design. Verify High-Sigma Design changes this by sampling from a different distribution, in which a greater proportion of samples are failures. This approach is a variant of importance sampling. Verify High-Sigma Design estimates the yield of high-sigma circuits by:
- Creating a new sampling distribution such that a greater proportion of samples are failures.
- Drawing samples from the new distribution, simulating them, and seeing if they meet specifications.
- Estimating yield by mathematically unbiasing the samples, according to importance sampling formula.
- Computing yield accuracy, using a statistical technique called bootstrapping.
To illustrate that Verify High-Sigma (VHS) design returns yield estimates as accurate as a standard Monte Carlo (MC) run, the following table compares MC and VHS yield estimation results across 6 different circuits on moderate-yield circuits (moderate yield so that MC only needs a moderate number of samples to make a good yield estimate). For all 6 cases, the yield estimates for VHS and MC agree because their yield confidence bounds overlap.
| Circuit | MC Yield (up to 10K samples) | VHS Yield (250 samples) |
| Current mirror | 99.580% (99.433% – 99.689%) | 99.709% (99.569% – 99.808%) |
| GMC | 99.836% (99.519% – 99.944%) | 99.831% (99.752% – 99.885%) |
| LNA | 99.950% (99.883% – 99.979%) | 99.888% (99.760% – 99.9662%) |
| Folded opamp | 99.221% (98.027% – 99.699%) | 99.490% (98.639% – 99.370%) |
| CP | 99.597% (99.410% – 99.725%) | 99.522% (99.291% – 99.682%) |
When design teams and managers consider which advanced technologies to incorporate in their flows, their metrics include quality of results (QoR), use model, ease of adoption, and cost. Verify High-Sigma design technology addresses each of these metrics. Designers can improve the quality of their results by changing their designs using High-Sigma extracted corners. They can statistically verify their designs with SPICE accuracy in a relatively short amount of time.
TSMC versus Global Foundries Part II
The foundry business is a tough one. The golden age of semiconductors is clearly over and what remains is a highly competitive marketplace. This blog follows up my original TSMC vs Global Foundries which is the single most viewed page on my site.
Case in point #1: Founded in 2000, SMIC Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation is billed as one of the leading semiconductor foundries in the world and the largest and most advanced foundry in Mainland China. Harvard Business School even wrote a case study on SMIC’s business model, characterized as a Reverse Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT). Unfortunately cheap labor does not a foundry make. It takes highly experienced workers, advanced manufacturing technology, strategic marketing, and an ultra competitive business model. The semiconductor foundry business is a marathon, not a sprint. Also see TSMC vs SMIC.
Case in point #2: Chartered Semiconductor was created in 1987 as one of the world’s dedicated semiconductor foundries. Chartered Semiconductor continued a string of losing quarters until the Abu Dhabi government-owned Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) acquisition was passed by investors in a majority vote. Shareholders bought Chartered shares at the 1999 initial public offering (IPO) price of S$3.34, the shares were later consolidated at 10 for 1, so they effectively cost S$33.40 each. ATIC paid S$2.68 a share. Chartered had experienced workers and strategic marketing (Common Platform), but lacked the advanced manufacturing technology and competitive business model to be successful.
2010 brings us a truly global foundry with the ATIC acquisitions of the manufacturing arm of AMD and Chartered Semiconductor. Global Foundries now employs 10,000+ people spanning 3 continents and 12 locations with manufacturing operations in Singapore, Dresden, Germany, and a new leading-edge fab under construction in Saratoga County, New York. Global Foundries was founded with $4.5 billion in cash, with future backing going up to $7B. The New York fab alone will cost an estimated $4.5B.
GFI now has about $3B in revenues from more than 150 customers that include many of the world’s top fabless and fab-lite companies, such as AMD, Qualcomm, STMicro, IBM, and Toshiba. Process geometries in production are: .5um, .35um, .25um, .13um, .18um, 90nm, 65nm, and 45/40nm. Process geometries in planning are: 32/28nm and 22/20nm. Planned capacity is 1.6 million 300mm wafers annually by 2014, supplemented by 2.2 million 200mm wafers a year. Global Foundries has highly experienced workers from Chartered Semiconductor and AMD, cutting edge manufacturing technology from AMD and IBM, strategic marketing from Common Platform, add in a competitive business model and you will have the #2 foundry in the world.
In comparison TSMC has 23,000+ employees and will add 3,000 more in 2010. With $10B+ in annual revenues, TSMC accounts for 50% of the foundry market revenue and 80% of the profits. TSMC is considered a first source for semiconductor manufacture, meaning that leading fabless semiconductor companies work with TSMC first, then replicate manufacturing at the other foundries for redundancy and cost reductions. Global Foundries will challenge TSMC for first sourcing with AMD manufacturing technology and a manufacturing process partnership with IBM. In fact the first production 28nm wafers by a foundry were displayed by GFI at the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas this month. At least one of the wafers contained AMD/ATI GPUs.
Unfortunately the semiconductor foundry market is a maturing industry and likely to experience single digit annual growth in coming years. To diversify, TSMC is investing heavily in solar power and light-emitting diodes. Both are fast growing markets, have technological overlap with chip production, and offer far better margins and upside potential. There is a reason why TSMC is the #1 foundry in the world and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But competition breeds innovation so the foundry business will be much more interesting to watch with GFI challenging TSMC.
2010 Semiconductor Recovery
Any questions? Christmas was good for electronics and the start of a prosperous semiconductor New Year. Semiconductor inventories are low and demand is increasing around the world. Remember, there are 1,338,612,968 people in China that will need mobile internet devices and the stimulus money is gushing over there. There are a total of 6,795,200,000 people in the world that will need mobile internet devices and today there are only about 1,000,000,000 smartphones in use. Considering that you will purchase a new smartphone every 2-3 years, if you believe 2010 will be a good year for semiconductors, 2011 will be even better.
As consumer electronic devices go mobile, the lines between televisions, computers, phones, cameras, video games, browsers and operating systems will disappear. An electronics bubble has begun and I’m thrilled to be part of it. The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week was certainly an excellent start. CES is an industry recognized barometer as 100,000+ gadget geeks ogle 2,500+ exhibitors with an estimated 20k+ new products.
What I look for personally is technology that will change my life. Porsche changed my life in the 70’s, personal computers in the 80’s, laptops in the 90’s, and the smartphone in the 2000’s. For the next decade it is too soon to tell but certainly nothing at CES this year will change my life. Tablet PCs? 3D TV? E-Readers? YAWN. My prediction is that social media and mobile internet devices will continue to drive semiconductor revenue in the 2010’s.
This year I will turn in my trusty Blackberry for a standards based Android phone. Imagine what the personal computer industry would be without open source software, industry standard formats and protocols? Industry standards allow consumers like myself a cost effective choice of vendors for leading edge technologies, so no iPhone for me. The Google Nexus One cost of materials is said to be less than $175 and there are plenty of other Android phones to choose from. My smartphone choice will be based more on audio than anything else. I need high quality audio with great voice recognition. I want to throw away my dopey blue tooth headset so I also need advanced noise cancellation. A blue tooth hanging out your ear is so last decade!
Speaking of audio, be sure and check out the Virage/ARC Sonic Focus demo. Audiofile or not, the sound quality will amaze you. The embedded processor companies were at CES in force, Nvidia even announced their own Tegra mobile embedded processor. But the most impressive demo is the Sonic Focus audio enrichment software which brings realism back to digitally compressed audio. Speaker size and placement will always be a problem for mobile internet, data will always be compressed, devices will get thinner and lighter. Using technology created by artisans and engineers founded in the music industry, Sonic Focus IP technologies deliver audio performance of today’s consumer devices and enable an immersive, engaging and compelling experience. Hearing is believing so check it out.
My award for best gadget goes to Samsung’s 14-inch transparent display. Not that it would change my life but it definitely has the cool factor! Also, if you missed the CEO keynotes, as I did, they are all on the CES front page. Very polished, very Las Vegas, somewhat informative, definitely worth streaming on your mobile internet device while you drive or wait in line for a $5 cup of coffee.
Semiconductor Enabled Mobile Internet
The mobile internet market will be the single biggest semiconductor innovation driver in the coming decade. The technology required to continually integrate electronic devices into a single handset is daunting. The amounts of information that will need to be retrieved, processed, stored, and displayed will be catastrophic. Reference the Morgan Stanley Mobile Internet Report.
I touched on this subject in my blog Semiconductor IP Innovation and the mention of the Mobile Industry Processor Interface or MIPI as it is affectionately referred to. The semiconductor industry has done a decent job with industry standards which allow consumers like myself a choice of vendors for leading edge mobile technologies.
Next month brings the premier exhibition for mobile internet devices. The Mobile World Congress is the combination of the world’s largest exhibition for the mobile industry and a congress featuring prominent Chief Executives representing mobile operators, vendors and content owners from across the world. CEO Keynote Speakers this year include one of my favorites Eric Schmidt of Google. The CEOs this year will offer their views of the new mobile landscape, sharing perspectives and insights that serve to strengthen and advance the industry. This conference was first held in 1987 and attracts 50,000+ attendees. Follow me to Barcelona Spain via Twitter: DanielNenni
Semiconductor design enablement is represented at the Mobile World Congress by the top IP companies ARM, Virage Logic and MIPS. Even an EDA company (Mentor Graphics) is exhibiting this year. The MIPI Alliance Zone will be in Hall 2 (2H41) with Silicon Valley companies leading the way. At the physical interface layer there is Mixel, the leader in SERDES/PHY MIPI technology. At the controller level there is Virage Logic and Arasan. Virage licensed the MIPI controller from the AMD-ATI group last year and markets complete IP solutions that include embedded processors (ARC), embedded memories, and interface IP. Arasan “The Bus Stops Here” provides MIPI, I/O, and storage IP.
Currently the MIPI standard uses D-PHY technology with communication speeds of 500M-1GBits. The D comes from the Roman numeral 500. The latest draft of the MIPI standard uses M-PHY technology with communication speeds of 1000M-5GBits. The M comes from the Roman numeral 1000. In addition to higher speeds, the M-PHY will also consume less and dissipate less power. Mixel and Arasan are both contributing MIPI members and have M-PHY development activity on their respective websites. More detailed information is available on the Mixel M-PHY web page.
The ultimate gadget exhibition is next week in Las Vegas. The International Consumer Electronics Show starts on January 7th and boasts 2,500 exhibitors with an estimated 20k+ new products for you to see. MIPI will be well represented with the new Netbooks and Tablet PCs. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer will keynote followed by CEOs from Ford, Intel, Qualcomm, and Nokia. The most memorable CES show for me was when Bill Gates argued that hardware will always limit computer innovation. Andy Grove followed with an argument for software being the limiting factor. As it turns out both are true.
2010 Semiconductor Forecast
While the worst is definitely over, 2009 will probably be known as one of the steepest revenue declines in semiconductor history due to a drop in orders. The official semiconductor recession however started with the Q4 2008 financial reports, but could be seen even earlier in the year with failing forecasts and bugling inventories. So realistically it was the semiconductor debacle of 2008/09.
Looking forward, Q1 is historically weak for semiconductors but based on what I see with the foundries and their top customers business will be brisk. In fact, Q1 2010 may be one of the best revenue Q1s for the semiconductor sector in a long time.
Semiconductor distributors Arrow Electronics and Avnet have both told analysts that demand in North America is increasing with accelerated growth in Q1. Arrow Electronics serves as a channel partner for approximately 800 suppliers and 130,000 customers through more than 340 locations in 53 countries. Avnet operates in more than 70 countries, distributing electronic components from leading manufacturers to more than 100,000 customers around the world.
DRAM supply was already lagging demand when Windows 7 came out and put even more pressure on PC and laptop users to upgrade. Micron Technology, the DRAM bellwether, is now profitable for the first time in three years. Expect increased pricing, long lead times, and continued DRAM allocation in 2010.
FPGA companies Xilinx and Altera both bumped up sales guidance this quarter. Xilinx announced December quarter sales are expected to be up approximately 16% to 20% sequentially. This is a revision from previous sales guidance of up approximately 6% to 10% sequentially. Gross margin is expected to be approximately 64%, up from prior guidance of approximately 62% to 63%. Altera now expects sales for the fourth quarter to be 15 percent to 18 percent above third quarter levels. Previous guidance was for sales growth of 6 percent to 10 percent.
Semiconductor giants Qualcomm and Broadcom both projected optimism for the coming year. Qualcomm is hoping for a 10% increase in quarter over quarter revenues while Broadcom raised sales guidance for the current quarter. Broadcom revenue is estimated to increase sequentially from the third quarter of 2009 by roughly 5% to approximately $1.32 billion, compared to prior guidance of $1.25 billion.
In 2010 you will see the semiconductor industry back on track with revenue and shipments substantially greater than 2009. As mentioned in Semiconductor Industry 2008-2018, the mobile internet market will drive semiconductors for the next decade with an incredible integration of electronic devices targeting the 6,792,600,000 consumers on the earth today. The big question is will the foundries be able to satisfy the ever increasing fabless semiconductor demand in the coming decade?
As I mentioned in Black Friday and the Predicted Semiconductor Shortages , a strong indicator of future semiconductor growth is foundry capital expenditure plans. TSMC, the #1 foundry provider, spent more than $3B on manufacturing equipment this year. UMC and Chartered Semi were at $500M, and SMIC a mere $190M. Clearly TSMC sees future capacity issues where the other foundries do not. As TSMC’s capital expenditures rival semiconductor titans Intel and Samsung, what does TSMC know that the other foundry providers don’t? Unfortunately once they find out it will probably be too late, allocation will be the new semiconductor norm.
Semiconductor Industry 2008 – 2018
The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks our beloved semiconductor manufacturing #1 in the top ten industries with the largest wage and salary employment decline over the next ten years, with an estimated 145,000 U.S. semiconductor jobs being eliminated. Other downsizing U.S. industries include: retail, wired telecom, postal services, and publishing.
Semiconductor and other electronic component manufacturing
Number employed in 2008: 432,000
Number employed in 2018 (est.): 287,000
Percent decline: -33.7%
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report also projected total employment to increase by 15.3 million (10%+) during 2008-2018. The projected growth for 2008-2018 is larger than the increase of 10.4 million for 1998-2008 due to the recession that we are currently in.
The internet is easy to blame for such progress with the ability to outsource anything and everything including semiconductor design-manufacture-production. What was once the epitome of Silicon Valley High Technology, semiconductors are now produced and consumed like potato chips mostly outside of the United States.
Even more interesting is the Morgan Stanley’s (Mary Meekers) ginormous Mobile Internet Report of December 2009 (424 pages). It starts as a walk down memory lane with mainframe computing of the 1960’s, minicomputers 1970’s (my entry into computing), personal computing 1980’s, desktop internet computing 1990’s, and mobile internet computing 2000’s.
You can bet Venture Capitals around the world will treat this as a road map for technology investing in 2010. So expect an acceleration of the mobile internet integration into everyday life. The semiconductor winners will be the handset chip suppliers: Intel, Samsung, Qualcomm, Marvell, Broadcom, Mediatek, and the likes. The losers will be anybody who doesn’t think that cloud computing and mobile internet devices will rule the global economy.
If you want to see the most advanced mobile society visit Japan. By design it is a requirement. Multiply the population density of Tokyo by the cost per square foot of living space, factor in a dependency on mass transit, divide by the square root of electronic devices now required for a modern lifestyle and you will see a maximum capacity of one electronic device per person.
Silicon Valley is a much more primitive society with desktop computers, laptops, and stereos in houses, cars, and pockets. TV’s in every room, video game consoles and wired telephones. My house alone has:
- 7 computers
- 6 smartphones with unlimited texting
- 5 TV’s with a DVR, DVD, and video game consoles
- 4 wired handsets
- 3 remote controls per TV
- 2 wireless routers
- 1 partridge in a pear tree
Another interesting read is Mary Meeker’s The Internet Report, the investors guide to the dot-com bubble. Turn the time machine back 15 years, back to the early days of body piercing, dial up internet, Netscape, and Windows 95. The supporting quotes said it all, clearly they were on to something:
“The definitive Internet report…Burn all the others.” – L. John Doerr, partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers
“A great primer for anyone considering an investment in the many emerging segments of this dynamic market” – Dr. Eric Schmidt, chief technology officer, Sun Microsystems.
John Doerr is a billionaire Silicon Valley VC who led funding rounds for Netscape, Amazon.com and Google. Dr. Eric Schmidt is the current billionaire CEO of Google.
Semiconductor IP Innovation
By definition:
Invention is a new composition, device, or process.
Innovation is a new way of doing something or “new stuff that is made useful”.
Even better:
Invention is the conversion of cash into ideas.
Innovation is the conversion of ideas into cash.
In an industry bound by technical standards and the law of physics, innovation is the absolute key to semiconductor IP success. One of the most recent examples of Semiconductor IP innovation is the unified MIPI/MDDI PHY Solution-
Mixel first to market with Unified MIPI/MDDI PHY IP solution
-which leads to the interesting topic of interface standards.
Smartphones and the ever growing features list are driving this technology hard. As smartphones replace your cell phone, camera, GPS, iPod, game console, video player, etc… an incredible amount of data must pass between this pocket-sized device and your face.
The first such interface standard was developed by semiconductor giant Qualcomm:
Mobile Display Digital Interface (MDDI) is a high-speed digital interface developed to interconnect the upper and lower clamshell in a flip phone. The MDDI solution, A Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) approved standard, supports variable data rates of up to 3.2 Gbit/s, and decreases the number of signals that connect the digital baseband controller with the LCD display and camera. The integration of MDDI is said to enable the adoption of advanced features, such as high-definition (QVGA) LCDs and high-resolution megapixel cameras for wireless devices, and supports capabilities such as driving an external display or a video projector from a handset.
Not to be out done, a consortium of giant semiconductor companies including Nokia, STMicroelectronics and Texas Instruments developed an overlapping interface standard:
The Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI) Alliance is an open membership organization that includes leading companies in the mobile industry that share the objective of defining and promoting open specifications for interfaces inside mobile terminals MIPI aims to shave complexity and costs while boosting flexibility for cell phones and the chips that drive them.
No, wait, it gets even more interesting. In regards to smartphone connectivity there are two standards: Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). GSM is a European standard a` la Nokia and STMicro while CDMA is an American standard a` la Qualcomm. ATT-Wireless and T-Mobile use GSM while Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, so now you know who’s really to blame when your phone can’t even get one bar! It stands to reason that GSM phones use MIPI and CDMA phones use MIDDI. According to iSuppli:
“The trend is clear. MIPI standard is gaining momentum. In the last couple of years, the number of MIPI alliance members nearly doubled to 180 members.” said Randy Lawson, Senior Analyst of iSuppli Corporation. “As a leader in the embedded IP space for these new high performance interface standards, Mixel is well positioned to take advantage of the growing adoption of MIPI support within portable communications products.” He added.
The Video Electronics Standards Association and Qualcomm may disagree. The $1B question is: Is there room inside your smartphone for both MIDDI and MIPI interfaces? The answer of course is yes, especially with a unified PHY. A much more eloquent explanation can be found in this excellent article authored by two of my LinkedIn connections Tim Saxe and Ashraf Takla entitled: Can MDDI and MIPI Coexist? A must read for mobile internet device (MID) developers and users.
Google versus Synopsys (EDA)
This Blog is a follow-up to my ever popular declaration that EDA is DEAD. I know comparing Google to Synopsys is apples and oranges, or more appropriately comparing apples and prunes, but the business model contrast is relevant. Googled: The End of the World As We Know It is absolutely the best book on Google to date. I also read Planet Google with much less interest.
Chapter #1 of Googled says it all with the visit of traditional media mogul Mel Karmazin to Google HQ in June of 2003. As CEO of Viacom, he was by his own admission paranoid of the competition. When Time Warner and AOL merged creating the largest media outlet, Karmazin went in search of online business partners. After spending a day with Google founders Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt, and understanding the Google engineering approach to advertising, Karmazin uttered the now infamous phrase” You’re f***ing with the magic!”
At the time, Viacom was responsible for $25 billion worth of advertising sold the traditional way which is best understood via Karmazin quotes:
“I know half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half.”
“You buy a commercial in the Super Bowl, you’re going to pay $2.5M for the spot. I have no idea if it’s going to work, you pay your money, you take your chances.”
“I want a sales person in the process, taking that buyer out to drinks, taking an order they shouldn’t have gotten.”
“That’s the worst kind of business model in the world (Google’s), you don’t want people to know what works. When you know what works, or not, you tend to charge less money than when you have this aura and you are selling this mystique.”
“Advertisers don’t know what works and what doesn’t. That’s a great business model.”
Which is a stark contrast to Google’s customer centric advertising business model. Instead of charging up-front licensing fees with no accountability for the performance of the product, Google takes a success based approach with the Adwords and Adsense advertising business model.
Pay per click (PPC) is an Internet advertising model used on websites, in which advertisers pay their host only when their ad is clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market.
Business in general is highly measurable if you have the right tools. It’s simple math, if a business invests X dollars in a product, they will get Y return on that investment, the result being a documented value proposition for that product. Google has a literal data mine for advertisers and provides free tools (Google Analytics) to measure success. So yes, the advertising business magic got GOOGLED, by making it more efficient and accountable.
Now contrast that with the Electronic Design Automation Industry and you will see a similar opportunity. Up front licensing fees will be replaced by customer centric, success based models with documented value propositions. Companies that lead this transition will flourish, followers and/or late adopters will get GOOGLED. Either way EDA as we once knew it is DEAD. Believe it.
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