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2007 January/February Issue


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Staying Competitive with a CE Platform Strategy

What if an entire CE product line could be developed rapidly and could react in weeks to customer feedback and market changes by delivering differentiated feature sets ahead of the competition? What if features could be tailored based on a single, basic electronic platform design for multiple users, price points or differing tastes and market geographies? Today this is clearly a capability and is emerging as a competitive advantage for savvy CE product developers.

Long ago, a mature consumer product sector adopted a design strategy which is being recognized just now as equally valid for CE devices. For decades auto maker product lines have shared essentially identical chassis designs to cut development time as well as maintain a competitive edge. By changing bodywork, engines and trim on an essentially common vehicle chassis, automotive engineers create four-door sedans, sporty coupes, SUVs and minivans.

Design and common parts investments are amortized over multiple models, and development time-to-market for the entire product line is substantially reduced versus a one-at-a-time approach. What's more, several model design refreshes are applied to the same chassis platform during its extended production life.

Across all electronics manufacturing and particularly in CE sectors, escalating competition is forcing product designers to re-evaluate development models. This trend is being addressed by the recent proliferation of low-cost field programmable gate array (FPGA) offerings. Applying programmable logic devices to the product accelerated Blaupunkt's development for its TravelPilot Rome automotive navigation system.

"Combining a programmable product strategy with excellent development support shortened our design time by six months and made it possible for us to meet the demanding schedule we set for the TravelPilot Rome," says Georg Sandhaus, Blaupunkt's director of system engineering. "We also reduced design complexity by replacing multiple standard components with a single device which eased our development effort and increased our product quality and reliability."

"Low-cost programmable logic devices (PLDs) are used in digital TVs, DVD players, handheld media players, set-top boxes, 'smart home' networks and computer peripherals," says Danny Biran, vice president of marketing with San Jose, CA-based programmable logic supplier Altera. "PLD's flexibility serves CE product developers by letting them rapidly develop new features simply by modifying the chip's programming in their design.

Programmable logic enables multiple versions of the same product for different segments at introduction and gives suppliers an option to provide new features in response to changing market demands with a minimum of additional engineering effort, and to provide upgrades to existing products in the field. This lets CE product developers continuously and cost-effectively refresh their product lines and provide differentiating capabilities. These can include video or audio enhancements, security functions, user-programmable functions, or even completely different modes of operation.

"Low-cost programmable logic devices (PLDs) are used in digital TVs, DVD players, handheld media players, set-top boxes, 'smart home' networks and computer peripherals. PLD's flexibility serves CE product developers by letting them rapidly develop new features simply by modifying the chip's programming in their design. -- Danny Biran, vice president of marketing, Altera

By adopting a platform-based product design strategy, CE designers can set a clear path toward rapid, low-cost innovation. Equally important, this strategy allows greater product differentiation with potentially increased margins, gets products to market earlier and helps keep a brand name with new features in front of customers. Additionally, programmable logic offers a measure of risk reduction by helping obsolescence-proof a product design. Designing with a reusable electronic platform also demonstrates a company's product roadmap, which can influence potential investment funding positively since one-product companies are less attractive to the financial community.

A CASE STUDY
CE market success demands ultimate flexibility and agility in product development. Take the case of veteran mobile radio maker Tait Electronics Ltd. headquartered in Christchurch, New Zealand. The company maintains a competitive position in the global market for private mobile radios (PMR) vs. giant competitors through its rapid responses to customers' demands. When designing its latest mobile radio, one of the goals was to develop a platform that was easy for third parties to integrate with, and that could form the basis for several additional products. Another key factor was the need for inherent architectural flexibility to cater to future, as yet unknown, requirements. Cost, time-to-market, processing power, component packaging and supplier relationships also were part of the design equation.

Tait's use of FPGAs rather than application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) allowed flexibility, albeit with some trade-offs in unit cost. Its strategy has proven effective. The TM8100 radio has exceeded company expectations as a product that systems integrators can interface with ease. Further, the follow-on TM8200 family, P25 TM9100 and TP9100, were all product models derived from the original TM8100 platform design, demonstrating classic examples of the "design once, make many" strategy.

The benefits of the platform strategy are amortizing time and financial costs over the extent of their product line. In Tait's development scenario, the majority of required design work was accomplished for the first product.

"With proper architectural design, we realized significant time savings in subsequent models," explains Tony Berggren, technology leader with Tait. "The use of the FPGA development tools' project revision control meant, along with easily configurable I/O, that the same core design solution could be compiled for differing product platforms and hardware requirements."

STAYING COMPETITIVE
Successful products in the CE market quickly face a flood of competitive products from a variety of manufacturers. This swift reaction causes rapid price erosion and frustrates CE product developers' attempts to derive significant revenue from their products during their shortening life cycles.
 
"As the price of FPGAs declined and performance improved, it fundamentally changed the economics of using FPGAs in embedded designs," adds Berggren. "We also expected that FPGAs would continue dropping in price quickly through competitive pressure and technological advancement, enabling the unit cost trade-off to be minimized early in the product family life-cycle. Overall, we estimated that the savings we gleaned in both flexibility of design and time-to-market outweighed the hard costs required to work with ASIC technology development."

Equally important was packaging. As radios continue requiring greater functionality in ever smaller packages, component size becomes critical. A range of FPGA package options has let Tait continue to meet customers' requirements. Early access to prototype hardware improved system stability. Engineers could exercise hardware and software more thoroughly during the development cycle. An FPGA-based design that was only partially completed provided software designers with a phased or incremental development process. These days, software development often takes up the bulk of a product's development effort. Getting the software team off to a quick start and removing obstacles helped maximize effectiveness of the hardware/software parallel design effort.

Another clear example of out-innovating competitors with a programmable design strategy is Pinnacle Systems' Studio MovieBox Deluxe for home movie producers. The Pinnacle product connects PCs, TVs and VCRs or camcorders for editing, playback and storage. Pinnacle used FPGA reconfigurability for multi-mode operation, depending on which video source cables are connected. The product design uses nearly one-third the logic chips than if the company had gone with a non-reconfigurable approach.Additionally, a small FPGA costing about one-fifth of the total bill of materials was used, which was well within budget.

"Our evaluation revealed that no other solution would have achieved either cost targets or met our aggressive development schedule better than an FPGA-based design," says Bernd Riemann, director of hardware engineering for Pinnacle Systems Inc.

There are many paths to product development success. Applying a programmable platform strategy can slash time-to-market and an entire product line's development costs. For companies seeking new ways of increasing their competitive advantage, bringing programmability into the equation is essential. 

TOP 5 TIPS TO KNOW

  1. Eliminate risk and enable the product to reach the marketplace faster by considering programmable logic as a design strategy. Off-load the most tentative parts of a design to programmable logic, so you can make changes until the product is released. Relying on a fixed logic-only design methodology means you must wait for the availability of a new component, and then spend time qualifying the component before it can be shipped in the product.
  2. Consider using programmable logic when designing products with uncertain standards. If you are designing products with interface protocols that haven't been standardized, PLDs allow modification of the interface late in the design cycle. If you only rely on standard products to implement interfaces, delayed product release will result if the interface protocol standard changes before the product goes to market. Worse, if the product is already in the marketplace, your system will require redesign to comply with newer standards, resulting in obsolete inventory.
  3. Consider product releases on six-month cycles. Some successful CE marketers revise products more frequently. Since application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) development cycles can take as many as 18 months, consider using programmable logic to add new features and functionality while waiting for the next revision of the basic product platform.
  4. Use PLDs to extend product life of the base platform. As products mature, you can spend less effort on support. Using PLDs in mature systems enables greater profitability while continuing to make required changes.
  5. Create scalable products using higher density PLDs to allow a broader product offering. Many CE products are developed from a basic model, which spawn mid- and high-end, full-featured models. The most profitable design approach involves adding more features with minimal redesign. PLDs are ideal for this. You can employ higher density devices, with exactly the same form factor and number of pins to enable more complex features, without circuit-board redesign. This lets you reapply your programmable platform, providing faster time-to-market than with fixed-function approaches. V

By Jim Lipman, a former electronics engineer based in Silicon Valley, now is a freelance editor. His past experience includes work at EON magazine, Tech Online, and stints at VLSI Technology, HP and TI.
July/August 2006