Philips Semi see payoff in platform-based design

Philips Semi see payoff in platform-based design
By Junko Yoshida, EE Times
October 11, 2002 (11:57 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20021010S0049

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands — A year into his tenure as the first North American to head up Dutch chip giant Philips Semiconductors, CEO Scott McGregor is still fighting to keep the company solvent and alter the public's perception of Philips as stodgy and spread too thin.

Central to both goals is a redoubling of the company's efforts in platform-based design. Philips embraced the idea early — in the mid-'90s, when platform silicon was less an architecture than a "marketecture," as McGregor put it in an interview with EE Times — but then saw the concept co-opted by the competition. McGregor cites Philips' recommitment to the platform approach under his watch as among his most notable accomplishments.

But Philips still has its critics. Philips Semiconductors today is "neither particularly focused nor nimble compared with such European counterparts as STMicroelectronics, " said Andrew Norwood, senior analyst at Gartner Dataquest in London. And Norwood said he has noticed "no marked changes" in the company's strategy since McGregor took the helm.

Meanwhile — like all companies in what ASML chief executive and former Philips Semiconductors CEO Doug Dunn called the semiconductor industry's "darkest hour" in a recent interview with the Financial Times — Philips is struggling to do more with less. McGregor's operation cut its chip sales forecast for the third quarter and is in the process of deciding which of its trailing-edge fabs to close. With no clear sign of a market upturn in sight, the company's near-term strategy is "to keep the structural break-even point down, so that even if the market doesn't grow, we can be profitable," McGregor said.

Earlier this week Philips announced that it is shutting its components division in Sunnyvale, Calif., after losing $54 million last quarter, to help sho re up its optical storage business. As part of the restructuring plan, Philips will sell off older analog businesses, move certain products to other divisions and form a group to focus on such display technologies as liquid crystal on silicon.

Philips' semiconductor division lost $63 million last quarter, compared with a loss of $252 million a year earlier.

McGregor and members of his management team told EE Times they intend to battle the downturn on five technology fronts in five hot areas: consumer (DVD+RW, digital TV), system solutions for cell phones, displays, RF ID and connectivity. The company's platform-based design campaign, meanwhile, is paying off in the form of design wins in mobile handsets, McGregor said.

As a result of recent deals with Samsung, Siemens and three large Chinese OEMs, one in every 10 mobile handsets sold worldwide by the end of the next year will use Philips' platform-based mobile chip set, which provides the RF section, baseband processing, power management and display ICs. "A dozen new handset models that will come out on the market [from these OEMs] in the third quarter will be based on Philips Semiconductors' Nexperia platform," said Mario Rivas, executive vice president for the company's communications businesses.

As Philips emphasizes platform-based silicon, ASICs will assume a somewhat lesser role. "We still offer ASIC services, and we will keep our ASIC tools sharp," said McGregor, "but ASICs will be used more and more in high-volume, high-value-added products that can be afforded only by large players on the market."

Philips' waving of the platform-design banner hardly seems original, when every silicon vendor in the world is touting a similar approach. But while its competitors have just begun the journey, Philips Semiconductors has been down the road awhile — and has made the bold admission that platform design is easier said than done.

'Passion and religion'

Philips Semiconductors was one of the first companies to tou t the merits of reusable intellectual property. What it didn't say back in the 1990s was that it had bitten off more than it could chew. "Philips was active in the platform concept in the beginning, but the company hasn't really milked it, compared with Motorola or Ericsson," said Alan Brown, principal communications analyst at Gartner Group's Dataquest Europe subsidiary.

And the "marketecture" rap may be hard to beat. "The Nexperia concept seems to be more of a theme, somewhat like Motorola's Digital DNA," said Will Strauss, president of market tracker Forward Concepts (Tempe, Ariz.).

McGregor has acknowledged that the company's design engineering teams often drifted away from the platform approach and that it was never broadly exploited across Philips' product portfolio. In the designers' defense, however, McGregor added that the engineers were pressured to develop "optimized" solutions and that those solutions may, of necessity, have strayed from the platform. Thus IP developed for a particular b us or interface would not be reusable, and "more work would be needed" to complete the next project.

Given such pressures, the platform approach "takes passion and religion to bring it all together," McGregor said.

Today, he said, Philips Semiconductors is backing up its commitment to platform-based design by investing "hundreds of million dollars in software development for reusable IP." Previous R&D spending in the area was almost nonexistent, he said.

Mix and match

Philips offers one version of Nexperia for high-end digital consumer entertainment systems and another for mobile handsets. Depending on the specific applications, "you can mix and match different CPUs and DSPs," said McGregor. "We offer either ARM or MIPS as a CPU core and a choice of TriMedia DSP or Adelante's DSP as a DSP core, in addition to the software infrastructure to wrap around them."

For a typical digital video set-top or DVD recorder system, Philips already provides silicon that integrates both a MIPS core and a TriMedia processor. For a mobile handset baseband processor, it offers a combination of an ARM core or multiple ARM cores and an Adelante digital signal processor. The DSP is based on a R.E.A.L. core that Philips Semiconductors developed internally then spun off to Adelante, a startup founded last year via the merger of Philips' DSP division and Frontier Design.

In pushing the Nexperia platform for the cell phone market, Philips Semiconductors has made some clear choices, including solidifying its DSP efforts on Adelante's DSP rather than the DSP Group cores that Philips inherited through the acquisition of VLSI Technology in 1999.

Whereas Philips' previous mobile-handset design wins involved a hodgepodge of RF chips and baseband processors opportunistically deployed in different handsets, the new design wins reflect a tight marriage of Philips' system solutions with its own mobile platform, according to Rivas. It has taken Philips three iterations of system solutions to get a major h andset vendor like Samsung to sign on to the Nexperia concept.

The latest iteration, internally called System Solution 3, offers "a GPRS [General Packet Radio Service]-enabled chip set, including a new baseband device designed with all the right hooks for multimedia applications, such as cameras, location-based information and wireless connectivity," Rivas said.

Asked how Nexperia differs from other companies' mobile platforms, Rivas quipped, "Ours works." Handset OEMs decide to go with a silicon platform design-in so "they can focus their R&D on designing their own value-added features," he said. Consider the task of handling Layer 1 to Layer 3 communications protocol stacks: "With our platform," Rivas said, "you don't need to worry about certification of a handset. You can leave our chip alone."

Samsung was already a customer of Philips' baseband processor; but under a new agreement, Rivas said, Samsung is using Nexperia, including a power management unit, RF, power amplifier and baseban d processor with Adelante's DSP.

As mobile handsets become more multimedia-centric, Philips is betting its consumer electronics expertise will enhance its mobile platform. "At Philips, we see consumer electronics as our birthright," said Rivas. "The combination of consumer and communication technology expertise [is something] you can only find here."

What about passives?

Philips believes its ability to integrate passive components into a silicon substrate in multiple layers is vital in reducing handset size. "When you open up a cell phone, besides baseband processing and RF silicon, you see all the crap — resistors, inductors and capacitors, etc., that look like jelly beans on a board," McGregor said. Those jelly beans devour real estate.

Four out of the top five cell phone manufacturers today use Philips' integrated discrete technology, McGregor said. "You can't field a whole platform without an RF/digital combination. But you also need the technology to integrate passive com ponents."