Choosing the Right Silicon Solution-Part 2

This special section reveals:

Ask the design teams
\If you want to know what people are doing, ask them. Ever since the collapse of ASIC design starts during the dramatic bursting of the Internet bubble, there has been frantic discussion within the engineering community about the intertwined fates of COT chip designs, ASICs and FPGAs. Adding to the drama, a new category — structured ASICs — emerged, appearing to offer a middle ground between cell-based designs and large FPGAs. And, much less ballyhooed but possibly more significant, complex application-directed standard-product ICs, variously known as platform ASICs, application-specific standard products or simply off-the-shelf ICs, surged as an alternative to the high design cost of ASICs and the high unit cost of FPGAs.

Small design teams get help from outsourcing
The study results paint an interesting picture of the state of design teams in North America. In brief, design teams are small, streamlined and often dependent on outsourcing. But there is interesting structure within these well-worn observations that is worth examining.

>High integration crosses application boundaries
No one design could be representative of the activity today in highly integrated systems development. Systems designs that met our criteria appeared all across the applications spectrum. They showed a huge variety of thinking in partitioning and implementation. But the statistics are fascinating, and they conceal some interesting generalizations.

Boring down into nitty-gritty of implementations
The seminal question of this study was how design teams were implementing the systems they were creating. Vendors of course wanted to know so that they could refine their marketing programs. More importantly, working designers and design managers needed the information so they could make their own decisions using a wider base of experience. In this regard the study has a lot to say.

Spreadsheets don't reveal nuances of decisions
If all decisions were logical, the decisions in partitioning and implementing a design would be a simple exercise in spreadsheet programming. You could break the system into blocks that maximized homogeneity within the block, minimized I/O traffic and minimized package count. Then you could easily decide whether each block should be done in an ASIC or FPGA or purchased as a standard product based on specifications, design complexity, cost and projected sales volume. It should be a snap.

Survey distills experience of 400 designers
Finding design teams is never an easy job. Designers, after all, are nothing if not busy — too busy to spend a lot of time hanging around the virtual water cooler, looking for surveys to take. And organizations tend to protect the identities of their designers. They don't want them distracted and, OK, to be frank, they don't want them recruited. So gathering data on design teams turns into a search for people who are rare, well-concealed and too busy to talk for long.

Winning core silicon game takes more than luck
Paper, rock or scissors? Picking the right one, plus a lot of luck, makes the difference between winning and losing the timeless game of chance.

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