Seizing the Emerging Silicon Opportunities Created by Vertical Integration
Phil Bishop, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Magma Design Automation
All technical product markets evolve to provide differentiation
and variety for the end customer. This evolution often involves a
period of increased vertical integration in an attempt to control
the customer experience and provide all the necessary elements of a
product's supply chain. Looking historically at the personal computer
market and most recently at Apple and Google in the mobile market,
the aggregation of software, silicon, services and sometimes patents in
an attempt to control the customer experience takes place. This level of
vertical integration usually signals that a market is seeking to stabilize
the customer experience and will enter a period of rapid growth. This
period of growth can also lead to unique challenges and increased
opportunities for emerging silicon providers and their partners. In
today's technical markets, vertical integration of an end product means
greater emerging silicon integration of complex analog and digital
mixed-signal technology. Success in these technical markets favors
design software suppliers who can provide fully integrated solutions to
these ever-increasing silicon integration challenges.
Vertical Integration and Technology Market Evolution
Early in the evolution of technology markets and before a full range
of contributors emerge to create a supply chain, some of the market
players will inevitably attempt to vertically integrate. This vertical
integration involves encapsulating all of the product development
and product integration under one company. Vertical integration can
lead to a more uniform customer experience, a reduced development
schedule and the improved coordination of a complex product
development. On the downside, vertical integration can lead to
higher costs since not every step of the supply chain experiences
competition. Vertical integration can also lead to a decrease in product
variety if the vertically integrated company driving the end product
lacks investment capital. As a technology market further stabilizes,
a period of specialized integration begins. At this stage, market
participants understand the needs of the customers and emerge with
specific core competencies such that the end product can be created
with highly optimized components. Finally, as a market matures, the
virtual integration state is reached. Here a single company will often
manage a tightly coordinated supply chain to allow for the greatest
degree of product variety and cost tradeoffs.
For a historical example, please refer to Figure 1 regarding
the PC market. The PC market circa the late 1970s, by necessity,
started out extremely vertically integrated. The Tandy TRS80,
Commodore PET and Apple II were all largely self-contained, with
hardware and software primarily created and integrated by these PC
manufacturers. This era of vertical integration in the PC market led
to a period of rapid growth. As the PC market entered the 1980s,
specialized integration began to take shape. The IBM PC was a
good example of the use of specialized integration. The Microsoft
and Intel combination (Wintel) helped IBM specialize on other
aspects of the overall PC design. Finally, in the 1990s, the PC market
moved towards virtual integration, the approach typically deployed
today, where most PC manufacturers manage a tightly coordinated
supply chain of specialty providers to assemble the PC hardware
and software. In many cases such as at Dell, the provider within the
supply chain actually performs the hardware assembly, integration
and testing onsite at the PC manufacturer.
Another example of a vertical integration approach within a
present emerging market is the smart phone and tablet markets in
the mobile space. There is a spectrum of different approaches in this
quickly evolving space, with Apple and Research in Motion (RIM)
participating using more of a vertical approach. Apple's latest iPhone
4 design uses intellectual property (IP) from ARM Holdings and
Imagination Technologies, but the integration and design of the
application processor chip and the development and integration of
the software operating system (OS) is performed by Apple. RIM supplies its own software
OS but typically uses application processor chips
from suppliers such as Texas Instruments. It is expected that until
the customer experience and demands stabilize in these mobile
markets, vertical integration will be the favored approach. There
are some recent specialized integration mobile players, however,
with HiSilicon Technology Corporation and Motorola Mobility
Incorporated being good examples. Their expertise is in the system
specification and integration of smart phones or tablets, with the
software coming from Google and the application processor chip
coming from a Qualcomm or NVIDIA. It will be interesting to see
if the latest merger of Google and Motorola Mobility leads to a more
vertical approach for both players in the mobile space.
Figure 1. Vertical to Virtual Integration in the PC Market
Vertical Integration and Emerging Silicon Market Opportunities
Vertical integration within a technology market drives the demand
for more of a platform approach to building silicon devices. Today's
emerging silicon opportunities involve complex digital, analog and
memory-based system-on-chip (SoC) platform designs. These SoC
platforms have insatiable performance, storage, energy efficiency and
connectivity demands. As shown in Figure 2, three major technology
market opportunities are proving instrumental in driving the demand
for these emerging silicon systems: mobility, cloud computing and
consumer electronics.
As mobile products continue to see an astronomical increase
in consumer and user-generated video, outstanding graphics
performance is at a premium. In a typical mobile user profile,
YouTube alone averages as much as 20 percent of the existing mobile
bandwidth. The advent of mobile gaming and picture quality video
on mobile devices is also creating an increasing desire for greater
graphics resolution. Many tablet and smart phone products have a
graphics resolution trending between 720p and high-density 1080p.
Along with outstanding graphics performance, mobile products
need increasingly greater levels of connectivity. Data network
interconnectivity via Wi-Fi and 3G/4G cellular is now imperative for
all high-end mobile devices. Most mobile devices can now network
to standalone servers and PCs to be able to access permanent user
information and to enable file sharing and data downloads. This
level of graphics performance and connectivity demands SoC
platforms that integrate multi-core central processing units (CPUs),
graphical processing units (GPUs), Universal Serial Bus (USB), radio
modems and multimedia processing. These SoC platforms use multicore
processors and symmetric multiprocessing to help optimize
performance and power.
Cloud computing is the convenient on-demand service
provisioning of a configurable pool of computing resources. Cloud
computing is growing very quickly in enterprise and service provider
networks and is a factor driving the demand for intelligent high-speed
network processing SoC platforms (NPSP). A NPSP for cloud
computing must work in concert with traditional x86-based compute
sub-systems. This multi-core heterogeneous approach allows the x86
sub-system to run application software, while the NPSP manages the
high-speed network and data center security provisions. Managing
a high-speed network means that network processing involves the
need for fast and efficient multi-threaded architectures and interfaces
to high-performance double data rate (DDR) memory sub-systems
for packet processing. Additionally, network processing platforms
must allow access to the cloud computing infrastructure via cellular
networks and wireless devices.
Consumer electronics is a broad category that can include
mobile devices and also extends into high-end computer gaming
devices, high-definition television, digital cameras, media players and
advanced home appliances. Once again, the need for greater levels
of performance and connectivity are dominating today's consumer
products. Similar to the mobility market, in consumer markets, there
is an emerging silicon design need created by vertical integration.
These emerging silicon SoC platforms must handle high-resolution
video processing, while balancing the need for connectivity,
performance, area and energy efficiency.
Figure 2. Emerging Silicon Market Opportunities
Vertical Integration and the Challenges of Emerging Silicon Designs
Emerging silicon devices help to enable greater vertical integration
by bringing together high-performance digital, analog, memory and
radio frequency circuitry on a single silicon platform. The complexity
of these platforms gets compounded by the integration opportunities
available at advanced processing nodes such as 28 nm. A high-level
design flow for silicon platforms is shown in Figure 3. The
key functions of an integrated design flow for vertically integrated
silicon devices includes full-chip simulation of mixed-signal designs,
IP characterization, digital sign-off, and analog and digital design
implementation all operating on an integrated data model.
As mixed-signal designs increase in size and grow more complex,
the ability to achieve correct functional verification becomes very
challenging. Verification becomes virtually impossible for current
simulation solutions once fully extracted parasitics are introduced.
Full-chip simulation of large analog and digital mixed-signal designs
is a challenge in terms of run time and capacity for traditional Simulation
Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)
simulators. What is needed is a fast multi-CPU circuit simulator
that handles full-chip capacity while maintaining SPICE levels of
simulation accuracy. These circuit simulation tools must deliver
silicon-accurate results for very large complex systems (5M transistors
and more) such as wireless SoCs and full-chip memory designs. IP
characterization in vertically integrated silicon devices must deal with
standard cells, complex input/output (I/O) and embedded memory
models to eliminate additional pessimism in the design margins.
IP characterization needs embedded multi-CPU circuit simulation
and efficient standard cell, I/O and memory models to create silicon
predictability and design productivity.
Current large integrated SoC designs have hundreds of design
modes and analysis corners and a general lack of accuracy between
implementation and sign-off tools. Sign-off solutions for vertically
integrated silicon will need to handle multiple timing, extraction
and physical verification scenarios with an efficient use of hardware
resources. Concurrency, in terms of handling all of these design
modes and analysis corners, is imperative for these sign-off solutions.
The timing, extraction and physical verification solutions need to
work together as an integrated platform to speed overall digital signoff
turnaround time and accuracy. Timing and extraction should be
correlated to SPICE and 3D field solvers, respectively.
Design implementation solutions need to have the capacity to
handle increasingly large analog and digital SoC platform designs.
Design implementation software must deal with clock tree design,
timing-driven placement scenarios, routing congestion, analog
shape-based routing, memory routing and multiple scenario place-and-route optimizations. Increasingly, sign-off in the loop is needed
to improve optimization accuracy and to reduce the number of
place-and-route implementation cycles. Many of the SoC platforms
reviewed in this article are entering markets that have severe power
requirements. State-of-the-art design implementation solutions must
handle dynamic voltage frequency scaling, multi-voltage islands and
provide power optimization via clock-gating technology.
Each of the design flow functions of full-chip simulation, IP
characterization, digital sign-off and design implementation are
needed to address a single-chip application processor SoC design
as shown in Figure 3. This design has multiple ARM cores, 3D
graphics processing, audio and video digital signal processors (DSPs),
multimedia and image processing, USB, I/O and a complicated
memory sub-system. This is the type of application processor one
might see in a typical vertically integrated mobile or consumer device.
Figure 3. Fully Integrated Solutions for Emerging Silicon
Summary
All technology markets evolve to create more differentiation for end
customers. Creating this level of product differentiation includes
periods of vertical integration, where suppliers increase their level of
hardware and software development and integration. In particular,
increased hardware integration with a vertically integrated approach
can lead to the integration of digital and analog/mixed-signal
systems into single-chip SoC platforms. These single-chip silicon
platforms are necessary to address the performance, power and area
requirements that are essential to technology market success. These
complex silicon platforms are now critical to seizing key market
opportunities such as mobility, cloud computing and consumer
electronics. To be successful in today's technology markets, electronic
design software suppliers must provide integrated full-chip solutions
to enable the design of these complex silicon platforms.
About the Author
Phil Bishop is Magma's corporate vice president of worldwide marketing,
responsible for the Silicon One initiative, product marketing, solutions marketing,
corporate marketing, corporate strategy and planning. Bishop joined Magma's
sales organization in 2010 and was responsible for managing Magma's largest
global accounts. Prior to that, Bishop was the CEO of two start-up companies,
Pyxis Corporation which was acquired by Mentor Graphics and Celoxica
Holdings Place which was an English company he took public in 2005. Prior
to that, Bishop was vice president of worldwide consulting for Mentor Graphics.
He gained extensive semiconductor design experience while working for Motorola
Semiconductor and Boeing Electronics. Bishop received an MBA in global
business from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and bachelor's
of science degrees in electrical engineering and computer engineering from the
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Phil Bishop can be reached at pbishop@magma-da.com
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