Postcard From Dallas
Hopeful Signs and Other Highlights of Motorola's Smart Networks
Developer's Forum
by Lee Goldberg
Greetings from Dallas, Texas, home of "The Grassy Knoll," some of the best pit barbeque in the nation, and this year's Motorola Smart Networks Developers' Forum (SNDF). While I normally file a huge feature-length story from events like this a two-week road trip has forced me to keep this to a mercifully short editorial-length.
Despite the difficult events in Iraq, and the overall gloomy economy, the conference was quite upbeat, and justifiably optimistic about Motorola's future. This is because the company has actually followed through on most of the radical re-engineering and housecleaning it proposed at least year's SNDF (for details, see the July '02 story : Motorola Maps Out Its Future At Smart Networks Developer's Forum"). Through consolidation of operations and some painful layoffs the company was able to shed several hundred million dollars off its operating budget without killing too much of its production or development ability.
Part of the savings are being realized moving most of the vanilla CMOS production to a 300 nm facility it jointly operates with Philips and STMicro, but there is more to the story. It seems that Motorola has really re-gained a clear focus for its Networking and Communications Semi Group (NCSG) that centers around embedded communications applications in both wired and wireless markets.
One of the apparent results of Motorola's concentration on the computing side of networking is that it has turned to some excellent partners for some of the PHY-layer components it might have felt compelled to develop itself a few years ago. While they are still continuing to lead in some RF applications (i.e. cellular handsets and base stations), they are welcoming the expertise of other manufacturers in the line side of their DSL, WiFi, and Gigabit Ethernet connections. For example, Motorola's new integrated broadband residential gateway reference design employs STMicro's ADSL transceiver, and Intersil's 802.11b WLAN chip set. They are also teaming with Marvell for items like Gigabit Ethernet transceivers, and counting on Tundra for PCI/PCI-X bus bridging products and support of many RapidIO functions.
Building the Ecosystem
Like their competitors at TI, the folks at Moto were amongst the first to realize that they don't really sell chips, but solutions, and have worked hard for several years on a two-pronged strategy to deliver their products as solutions. They have successfully wrapped nearly every product they make in a package of support tools, protocol stacks, driver APIs, basic debug tools, and reference designs that help designers bring products to market more quickly. This, combined with lots of third-party tools, operating systems, and application software make the Motorola universe a user-friendly environment for both hardware and software development.
By recognizing that their "ecosystem" extends beyond 3rd-party software tools, Motorola has created a cooperative, open environment where innovation may come from any partner, and benefit all the players. It stands in sharp contrast to the more rigid top-down system favored by Intel. In embracing a more open business environment, Motorola has decided to create a more flexible, and probably more sustainable position in the market for itself.
RapidIO On The Go-Go
Another part of Motorola's recovery was to "bet the farm" on
a few key technologies that they believed would be good for both the company,
and the entire industry. RapidIO seems to be one of those long-term investments
that is beginning to pay off nicely. The appearance of several pieces of
RapidIO silicon at this year's SNDF marked the point where RapidIO moves
from a promising curiosity to a commercially-viable technology. Tundra Semiconductor 's release
of a four-port RapidIO switch and a PCI/RapidIO bridge will pave the way
for the DSPs, processors, and components to build high-capacity, high-density
computing systems. The arrival of the PowerQICC III, the first processor
(more about this below) with native RapidIO capability will also help accelerate
the technology towards commercialization.
For those who are either considering or committed to using RapidIO in their
next design, the IneoQuest
has developed a remarkable Hardware Interoperability Platform (HIP) that
can serve as an evaluation, or even development system for RapidIO-based
systems. The board has four 250/500-MHz slots, as well as a 33/66-MHz PCI
slot and a Tundra bridge chip to connect them all. This, plus JTAG support
and a connection for a differential signal analyzer probe make this an excellent
place to plug in your prototype board or simply get your feet wet with the
technology.
Array Processing Architecture Builds Path To Future
Motorola has also made a bold move in communication signal processing by committing to develop a family of array-based computing. They realized that while the company had very respectable DSP offerings in its ColdFire and AltiVec products, it had to do something radical to differentiate itself from the heavily-entrenched position held by Texas Instruments, or concede the market. To this end, they have licensed a very intriguing reconfigurable compute fabric (RCF) architecture that is designed specifically to bludgeon compute-intensive tasks into submission with a array of fast, flexible processors.
Each CPU in the RCF array is a hybrid RISC engine, with some features and instructions added for limited DSP operations and coordinating tasks between its neighboring units. The array can be configured to put as many or as few processors on a task as necessary by a built-in RISC-based controller. The engine itself is small enough that a large number (I'd guess up to 64) can be comfortably squeezed on a single chip to do lots of the repetitive, compute-intensive operations found in places like the correlators of 3G base station baseband processors or inspecting IP headers. What's more, the array can be easily "ganged" with others across a high-speed interconnect fabric to form even more powerful compute engines.
While I was briefed on some of the finer points of the RCF architecture and its applications, the officially-released details are still somewhat sketchy. For the moment, all I can say is that if the software support for the architecture is as good as Motorola claims it will be, there is a good chance that RCF will give them a shot at gaining a larger market share for many applications such as 2.5G/3G cellular base stations, software-defined radios, and possibly even certain packet-processing functions. Hopefully I should be able to fill you in on the juicy details in early or mid-July when they expect to trot out an RCF test chip at the European Developer's Forum.
Geeks At Heart
Despite all the corporate glitz, exceptionally-entertaining parties, and slick production values that go into the Developer's Forum, its real charm lies in the fact that it's an overgrown college science fair at heart - albeit with much better grub and booze. This was most apparent at the final general session on Wednesday (March 24), when the division VP/GM, David Perkins, presented the audience with a special treat - a live demonstration of the first PowerQUICC III chip running code for the first time in public.
The chip, announced at last year's SNDF, is a highly-enhanced version of the current PowerQUICC II, with much more computing power, enhanced I/O options, and the first native RapidIO interface to appear on a processor. The chip we saw had come back on the first wafer to emerge from the fab four days earlier. Perkins explained that there had been a team working night and day since then to be ready for the afternoon's demonstration.
The test lash-up, including the processor development board, power supplies, and a powerful logic analyzer was given center stage while the analyzer's outputs were flashed on the hall's big screens. The processor was obviously an alpha chip, sporting a ridiculously large heat sink, and running only a simple set of test vectors, but the audience was entranced. The crowd greeted the logic analyzer's display of the processor successfully hunting down its boot sequence with an enthusiastic roar normally reserved for sporting events.
In fact I think that there was about the same excitement displayed when Emmitt Smith, football's all-time rushing yardage champion, made a guest appearance later in the closing session. It seems his formidable accomplishments were an equal match for the little chip that embodied the blood, sweat, and dreams of so many designers, marketers, coders, and developers who were involved in its creation. If Motorola enjoys a bright future it's going to be a direct result of the difficult restructuring it has just come through, and the raw enthusiasm of the folks who keep the company's technology moving forward.
Questions? Comments? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.