When mobile phones were originally designed, they were exclusively a communication product. Later, they became a communication plus consumer electronic product. Now, they are evolving into a communication plus consumer electronic plus computing product.
Today, mobile phone design involves integration of designs for cameras, GPS navigation systems, game consoles, MP3 players, PDAs, etc. Who knows what more would become a part of consumer expectation from the mobile phone?
I think the phenomenon of convergence has found its best expression in the personality of the mobile phone.
For products, the consumer expectation is changing from application-specific to multi-application-domain. Most electronic products would go the combo way.
What does this mean to the design engineer? This means he has to design flexible architectures that can be used for application clusters. Such a requirement contradicts some other important requirements. For instance, flexibility results in higher power consumption and larger chip areas. With portability and larger battery life becoming increasingly important for product market success, how can the designer meet flexibility demands?
Designing within conflicting demands will be very different from the conventional design method, commonly known as "Y-chart," wherein the designer concurrently develops architecture and application. "Y-chart" has provided latitude sufficient for most contemporary products. For instance, HW/SW co-design allows trade-offs between hardware and software. Mixed-signal co-design allows trade-offs between analog and digital. As more tasks move from analog to digital, the methodology enables relaxing the system RF part. However, this flexibility is inadequate for application integration that future appliances need, and a thorough debate is called for to understand problems and possibilities of designing for combos.
As for ICs, the limiting factor will be economics rather than technology. Non-recurring engineering costs will have to be minimum. Here again, appliance design finds itself between conflicting demands. On one side, designers will want to use state-of-
art semiconductor technologies, characterized by a rapid rise in cost at each new technology node. Deeper into nanometrics, mask costs rise faster than economies obtained through computing power gain due to technology scaling. The number of masks also increases at each technology node. On the other side, to keep product cost minimal, costs need to be curtailed at all stages from design through production.
I think the best emerging way of working between contradictory demands is the so-called "flipped-Y chart," on top of the conventional "Y-chart." Herein, the designer determines which applications can be grouped into one application domain. While determining this grouping, the designer ensures that the design provides just enough flexibility to ensure a workable architecture. Such grouping also ensures amortizing the growing non-recurring engineering cost over a larger volume.
EDA tools needed to help designers determine application domain and just-enough flexible architecture are few and far between. Most EDA tools cater to a single application over a dedicated architecture. The abstraction level required for multiple applications over flexible architectures is much higher than current EDA methodologies can provide. Perhaps it is the lack of adequate dialog on issues concerning flexible architectures that have hindered EDA growth in this direction.
In the new design approach, no single company can provide the complete range of products and services. Different companies will play different roles, ranging from compiler houses, RTO vendors, place & route, verification, data and memory optimization within application threads, hardware and software co-design, etc. In other words, along various stages in the value chain different companies will interact and cooperate to take design to its utility culmination. I see on EDA horizon the birth of communities whose members will offer integrated services rather than competitive services.
You can reach Kirtimaya Varma at
kirti.varma@rbi-asia.com
