India today is widely acknowledged for its significant presence of electronic and design firms, emerging domestic market and excellent talent pool. All these are the contributing factors toward the country becoming an important design destination in the global arena.
While a majority of global corporations have design centers in India, over the past few years they have moved up in the value chain. Earlier, the Indian design centers were largely involved in projects which served the needs of the parent company. Of late, their roles have changed significantly and they now form the core in delivering end-to-end design activities. The large talent pool available in the country and their ability to execute complex designs have attributed in enhancing Indian design centre’s value proposition.
Consumer electronics is steadfastly pushing semiconductor market in India and abroad. This has lead to a need for more system-on-chip (SoC) designs along with design automation tools and hardware/software co-verification solutions.
Freescale Semiconductor has an advanced line of business pursuing customer specific SoCs. With this initiative, customers can take advantage of Freescale’s end-to-end expertise, standard platforms and processes, and utilize the same to build customer specific solutions. For instance, customers can choose to remove multiple Ethernet interfaces in a Freescale standard product and then add an in-house-designed IP, resulting in an advanced custom product. And Freescale supports this custom product development from the concept to validation, characterization and final production.
This provides several advantages to the customer – they could focus on the specific IP while relying on a proven platform, Freescale’s zero-defect methodology, flexible manufacturing options, and systems and software expertise, including a vast portfolio of third party tools. More importantly, if customers have an existing design based on one of the Freescale’s platforms/architectures, it could be easily migrated to the advanced ASIC platform that saves time to market and cost.
Freescale Semiconductor India is pivotal in this endeavor. When Freescale envisaged this business line, the India team was the unquestioned partner. Significant part of the custom ASIC development is done in the India Design Center (IDC), which covers several aspects of this business line such as business development, system and SoC architecture, design, verification, validation, software development, documentation, test and product engineering. Snce the conceptualization of Customer Specific Business in Freescale, the IDC group has ownership of multiple custom products from concept to product delivery and support. This line of business operations from the India Center is a clear example of a shift in focus from design support to product development and ownership.
ChallengesCustom ASIC development brings in its own a set of challenges. Some of these are discussed below:
- Time to market: This is one of the most important considerations for the end customer, who is typically focused on a highly integrated, cost optimized solution. One of the ways to mitigate this risk is the reuse of platform, test setup and software.
- Feature definition: Feature creep could be a challenge in a time and resource limited development effort. However, not allowing for enough customization is also deterrent to this line of business. A balance between the two, taking the customer into confidence and signing off a detailed feature overview document are the keys to mitigate this risk. In addition, care must be exercised to monitor the readiness of the customer IP.
- Customer in the loop: This is absolutely necessary to ensure that there are no surprises. Good management practice calls for regular progress monitoring discussions with the customer.
- Development Model: Custom IC development forces a lot of parallel development efforts. One has to deliver the documentation incrementally to the customer in line with the development effort itself. In addition, it is imperative to have the pre-silicon validation of software and firmware. This greatly eases the burden of proving the chip once the evaluation board and the first samples are available. Since the custom solution leverages one of the standard products, one could verify most of the software components and test software on the standard platform. This effort is essentially a V-model with the hardware design and development.
Custom SoC study on smart grid applicationsSmart grid technology is being deployed worldwide as a means to optimize energy consumption and address concerns of climate change. Developments in smart grid technology are aimed at modernizing the electricity distribution grid by incorporating communication technology that will enable two-way communication between the utility and the consumer. A key aspect of this technology is demand response, where in, the utility can inform smart devices at homes or offices to postpone large scale consumption of energy when the energy demand is high and costly. It is believed that staggering the energy loads intelligently is an effective alternative to building new electricity generation, transmission and distribution capacity.
A key network element in the infrastructure for enabling demand response is the Home Energy Gateway (HEG). The HEG communicates with smart electricity meters and smart electrical appliances on the consumer side and data concentrators on the utility side. On the home network side, the HEG communicates to the energy meter and smart electrical appliances, such as washing machines, dishwashers, air-conditioners, heaters, etc.
The smart meters and appliances of tomorrow will be equipped with wireless interfaces such as Zigbee. Over Zigbee technology, the meter readings can be communicated to the HEG, which in turn passes it on to the utility. On the utility side, the HEG communicates to data concentrators over wireless interfaces such as Wi-Fi, WiMAX or 3G. This enables the utility to collect meter readings centrally, thus preventing fraud. The consumer can also log on to a website to track his energy consumption profile in real-time. During peak hours, when the energy demand is very high, the utility can instruct the smart appliances via the HEG to turn off, resulting in reduction of the demand.
The CSP team at Freescale India has designed a network processor SoC that forms the heart of the HEG. The device is custom made for a global OEM major. The device leverages extensively on Freescale’s PowerQUICC II Pro family. A high performance processor based on Power Architecture e300 core operating at up to 400MHz forms the heart of the SoC. At 1.89MIPS/MHz, the e300 core has more than sufficient horsepower to control the HEG functions.
The SoC has a built-in 16/32 bit DDR2 Controller with 8-bit ECC capability to interface with the main memory. The high speed peripherals comprise of a x1 PCI Express link with on-chip PHY and a Gigabit Ethernet MAC. To interface with a variety of 8-/16-bit memory devices like NOR/NAND Flash, SRAM, etc., there is a Local Bus Controller on the SoC. A high-performance DMA controller is provided for efficient data transfer. The low speed peripherals include the RTC, UART, I2C, GPIO and SPI. The on-chip Secure Digital Host Controller can interface to SD/MMC/SDIO cards. In addition to the above Freescale IP blocks, the customer’s proprietary IP optimized for the end application is integrated into the SoC, resulting in a significant BOM cost and space optimization. In a typical use case, the x1 PCI Express link can be used to interface to Wi-Fi, WiMAX or 3G cards. The SDIO interface could also be used for the same purpose. Similarly the peripherals such as UART, I2C or SPI could be used to interface to Zigbee transceivers.
Extensive reuse of Freescale’s pre-existing baseline platform resulted in a high-performance embedded processor with high-speed peripherals and customer specific IP at a very attractive price point and a significant time to market advantage. Both the cost and time advantages would not have been possible if the end customer tried to source the different IP blocks from multiple vendors and integrate these with the customer’s proprietary IP.
In addition to delivering the custom SoC, the CSP team also offers collaterals such as evaluation/reference design boards, board support packages (BSPs) and development tools. In this instance an evaluation board was designed to exercise all the features of the SoC and to assist in software bring-up. A Linux board support package was developed so that the customer could focus only on the value-added application software.
In summary, we envision customer specific product development has a bright future in addressing diverse areas as printers, networking, telecommunications, industrial, home gateways and consumer electronics/multimedia applications. By successfully participating in all elements of the SoC business, starting from the development and definition, design, validation, qualification, and up to the manufacturing process, Freescale IDC has leapfrogged in the semiconductor value chain.
Author InformationGanesh Guruswamy is the Vice President and Country Manager for Freescale Semiconductor India.
