Architecture or Application?
Gene Frantz
TI Principal Fellow and Business Development Manager, DSP
Are applications driving architecture design, or are architecture designs driving applications? Seems like a heretical chicken-and-egg question from a business standpoint. Our customers design applications, therefore their needs are paramount and our architectures should address those needs – they demand we supply: business 101.
But the realities of the semiconductor industry, namely the cost of creating new process nodes and fabrication – have made the answer to this question a little murkier. Today, for the most part, it is prohibitive for companies to design a chip geared toward a single application. This is especially true for smaller companies where, traditionally, innovation occurs. Therefore, innovation itself is in jeopardy if we adhere to old business models.
TI has become known for continually pushing process technology to its limits. With each node, performance has increased and power consumption has decreased as chips get smaller and smaller. But we have reached a critical point where these hard-fast rules are being tested by physics. More and more, manufacturers will have to rely on the abilities of multiple pieces of Intellectual Property (IP), such as processors and accelerators, in SOCs, combined with peripheral hardware and customized software.
This, in short, is the answer to our chicken-and-egg riddle. While some customers can afford the costs of fabricating specific devices, others will have to gear their designs to what is available and look to software as their tool to substantially differentiate.
Last year, TI introduced its DaVinci technology with this in mind (Note that the platform includes more than just the hardware). As a digital media architecture, it provides the necessary capabilities for a myriad of products in the audio and video industries. Customers can build from a standard, open platform, using optimized industry software to handle standard functions, with headroom to innovate and add their own features. I believe that this is where innovation will continue to flourish, at the software level. Companies can rid themselves of the burden, in terms of dollars and design time, by using a kind of universal architecture and concentrating on the functions that will truly differentiate their application.
So, in effect, architectures will drive how engineers approach their applications more than ever before. But, the focus of innovation will be in the software.