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EDN.COMMENT: Find your niche in the cell-phone-design ecosystem

In a discussion meeting at the SAME (Sophia Antipolis MicroElectronics) Forum that took place near Nice (France) in September, a number of major semiconductor suppliers to the mobile-phone sector outlined the rapidly evolving, collaborative design environment in which they find themselves operating. The theme of the meeting was the “wireless ecosystem” that the SAME organisation, in conjunction with a number of business associations in the Nice/Côte d’Azur area, is fostering.

One of the speakers was ST-Ericsson’s Dan Rabinovitz—ST-Ericsson has a 400-strong group in the Sophia Antipolis area that works on all aspects of cellular-baseband design and optimisation, and on integration of other connectivity standards—commented on how the business of supplying the cell-phone sector has changed dramatically. He referred, in particular, to the progressive adoption of standard operating systems: “Moving to an open-source software universe forces interaction with [a wider] community … We can, and must, be much more reliant on partners.” A number of speakers at the session outlined a business model in which the major semiconductor companies develop complex products—core chipsets for new mobile-phone models, in this case—on short timescales, with concurrent hardware- and softwaredesign flows. At the same time, they expect outside partner companies to develop aspects of the design for them, such as code for user-level applications. These partner companies might themselves be start-ups.

Texas Instrument’s Pierre Garnier described his own company’s programme to build a community of some 300 partner companies in its “ecosystem” over 15 years. And the new mobile-phone landscape where TI must “work with multiple high-level operating systems,” provides opportunities for small companies that can supply niche-market expertise.

The differences in scale must pose problems: for the large partner in any such relationship, any one engagement will be just one aspect of one project, among many product developments; for the small player, it will often be the entire focus of his venture. Is it inevitable that on every such development, the “little guy” effectively bets his or her whole company?

In an environment of such accelerated time-to-market, TI’s Garnier concedes that for the small company there will always be risks. However, he believes that small firms can reduce their risks in different ways. “Some are investing in co-simulation tools,” he says, enabling them to participate closely in the concurrent-engineering development process.

For small suppliers, in particular, ST-Ericsson’s Rabinovitz anticipates a lot of business in the M2M (machineto- machine) sector, in applications that use some aspects of the core cellular infrastructure— a market that he estimates at the level of “hundreds of millions of units” within five years. He mentions smart metering, location-based services, medical devices, and a wide range of industrial devices, as examples: “Large companies often don’t have the focus [for these diverse applications]: small companies can excel.”