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EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Feature creatures

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A presentation yesterday by the founders of Xmos gave an update (see the ‘latest news’ pages) on the progress of that project, and clarified the market niche it is aiming for. It plays to the belief of a lot of people, not just the team from Xmos – or the ‘traditional’ FPGA makers, for that matter – that the future of large logic-based designs is in some way programmable.
We can take for granted that for all but the highest-volume consumers of silicon, the conventional digital ASIC format is dead. Or as David May of Xmos and Bristol University puts it, “there are fewer and fewer design starts at the leading edge of electronics, and that can’t be right.”
The Xmos proposal’s prospects can’t be hindered by the fact that it plays in several spaces that are currently “hot” topics; it’s multicore; it’s programmable, configurable and, indeed, reconfigurable; and it addresses the hardware/software interface. Oh, and though real figures are not yet on offer, they say it should be energy-efficient. How cool is that?
For a novel approach like this to gain a foothold in the market, the value of a certain derivative must be greater than some threshold value. The top line of the derivative is “perceived change in product performance, design efficiency and general ease-of-getting-the-job-done”: the bottom line is “change in working practices for the designers who have to make it happen”. If the numerator is too small, or the denominator too big – allowing that these are subjective and not exact factors – it’s not going to happen.
If you want to introduce an innovative approach and you start from a point that is too far away from where your audience is right now, they won’t follow you however big the benefits. To this end Xmos’ prospects won’t be hurt by a design-flow-diagram that has boxes into which today’s hardware and software teams might see themselves fitting comfortably, without too much up-front re-education.
However, the assembled media at the presentation expressed a little scepticism about the argument – relative to design of consumer products – that one of the benefits of the technology is that you can readily add “differentiating features”. (This is an argument that many vendors, not just this one, employ.)
As far as the consumer is concerned, do gadgets have “differentiating features”, that buyers base their purchasing decisions on? Thinking of my set-top box, my DVT-T TV, my cellphone; mine don’t seem to, at least not at the level that their silicon architecture would affect. They seem to have two sorts of features. The first category is “basic” features, that every product in their class needs. The second is “superfluous” – long lists of them, buried in the user manual that no-one reads, and never invoked.
Differentiating features? Those would be styling, colour, will it match my room and, has it got the right brand name?

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