Motorola Maps Out Its Future At Smart Networks
Developer's Forum
Partnerships and Innovations Highlight Motorola's 3-Day Tech-Fest
In New Orleans
by Lee H. Goldberg
New Orleans, July 23 2002 - Greetings from New Orleans, home of the world's longest-running party. While most visitors are reveling in the rich food, raucous music, and frat-house-style drinking habits that seem to define the city's lifestyle, the 600+ attendees at Motorola's developer's forum have been engaged in a different sort of excess as they gorge their minds at a 3-day all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of the latest technologies and tools.
In a year where attendance at most technical events is sagging, there were nearly 50% more attendees who braved the heat and humidity of Louisiana in July to rub elbows with fellow developers and purveyors of the latest chips and software in the Motorola universe. The increased attendance can most likely be attributed to the pains Motorola took to ensure that the three days were packed with as much practical information as possible, and to provide access to their own stable of in-house experts.
Of course no visit to "The Big Easy" is complete without at least a sampling of the city's rich culture and nightlife. Forum members finally heeded the call of the wild on Tuesday at a Motorola-sponsored party at the (in)famous "House of Blues" Club, located just off Bourbon Street. It is difficult to say whether the food or the music was hotter at the well-attended party where the conference staff joined with customers and partners to momentarily forget the industry's difficulties and hope for better days ahead. The following morning's activities were somewhat subdued as both session leaders and participants braved the early technical sessions with only a few hours sleep.
In addition to showcasing its new products, partnerships, and technologies, Motorola's Networking & Computing systems Group (NCSG) used the forum as a means to give its best customers a feel for the massive internal changes it has made to align itself with the new realities of the marketplace.
Tough Times Breed New Strategies
Motorola executives made good use of the forum's keynote session to show how they were restructuring the massive semiconductor operation to target markets which offered the most rewards and to greatly reduce the cost of developing and producing its products. Fred Shlapak, Motorola's president of its Semiconductor Products Sector, outlined how the division had become increasingly focused on expanding its leadership in embedded processing and connectivity solutions for the communications, wireless, and automotive sectors by continuing to aggressively roll out new products and the tools to support them. He also credited the company's vigorous program to license its large storehouse of intellectual property for part of the revenues that are expected to edge the company towards profitability by the end of this year.
While this has helped boost revenues, they cannot completely offset the 31-39% sales slumps that the industry has experienced over the last year. Shlapak explained that this, and the rising costs of remaining competitive in the semiconductor market, had forced Motorola to create a radically different business strategy for itself. One of the major challenges faced by Motorola is the increasing complexity of ASICs, which push the limits of manpower, production facilities, as well as design and verification tools. With the costs of a typical 0.1-micron mask set anticipated to approach $1 million, it becomes even more imperative to develop the analysis and verification tools that ensure an ASIC design works on the first spin.
A New Partnership
Shlapak said that this, combined with the billion dollars needed to build a competitive 300-mm wafer fab facility, would not allow Motorola to continue with business as usual. While part of its strategy included reducing headcount by closing some of its excess fab and design capacity, Motorola has broken with its past practices and forged an unusual partnership with competitors ST Microelectronics and Philips Semiconductors to lower the ongoing costs of development and manufacture.
In adopting an "asset-lite" strategy, Motorola will rely heavily on this partnership for developing and producing much of its standard CMOS ASICs at a jointly-operated facility in Crolles, France. The development and manufacturing center will combine a 300-mm wafer fab facility and a team charged with creating IP and design tools to be used by the partner companies. This will include a set of 90-nm design libraries, including SRAM, DRAM, and MRAM.
It is expected that over time, the team will migrate these libraries to 65-nm, 45-nm, and 32-nm geometries. Another team will be responsible for developing a set of commonly-available analog modules, while another group will focus on creating the EDA and verification tools necessary to produce cost-effective designs with transistor counts in the tens of millions.
Shlapak said that this will help distribute the huge overhead associated with today's large SoCs and ASICs, while allowing Motorola to take advantage of its existing technical and marketing strengths. He also said that Motorola will retain exclusive control over all of its proprietary processes which it relies upon to provide a strategic advantage in the marketplace. These include its bipolar, BiCMOS, SiGe, and LDMOS capabilities.
A Second Partnership
In a second bold move, Motorola is also expanding its StarCore franchise. Co-founded with Agere several years ago, this high-performance DSP venture will now include Infineon. In this, and all its other operations, Shlapak stressed that Motorola will focus on providing platforms to promote rapid development cycles of products using its components, as well as "large ecosystems" of tools and application software to support them.
In keeping with Motorola's interest in creating ecosystems surrounding its products, many companies filled the "Tech Lab", a small show floor that gave vendors a chance to show their wares and provide visitors with hands-on experience with chips, boxes, development tools, and support software. Besides the large contingent of Motorola products, chip makers including Altera, Corrent, Marvell, and Tundra were out in force. Software and tools from the likes of Green Hills, OSE, QNX, Red Hat, Synopsis, and Wind River completed the lively scene.
A Quicker PowerQUICC
Amid this cacophony of product announcements, Motorola introduced its new PowerQUICC III family. Designed to handle the growing speed and complexities of edge-processing applications, the PowerQUICC III architecture offers several quantum improvements over the popular PowerQUICC II series, while retaining full backwards software compatibility (See Lee Goldberg's product review this week for details.
RapidIO On The Rise
Perhaps the upgrade to the PowerQUICC architecture with the farthest-reaching impact is the addition of native RapidIO capabilities. Intended as a high-speed processor interconnect technology, RapidIO (also known as RIO) was introduced several years ago as an open standard by Motorola along with a consortium of chip makers and support tool vendors. In its current incarnation, it employs an 8- or 16-bit parallel LVDS interface that is strikingly similar to the SPI-4.2 processor spec. This is overlaid with a transport protocol that enables high-speed, cache-coherent data transfers between processors, DSPs, and peripherals. RIO also supports easy, low-latency switching and multicast traffic as well. (For more details, visit the RapidIO Trade Association's web site.)
RIO's development and acceptance has been somewhat slow until recently, but with the final spec of the parallel interface done and a serial version (using a XAUI-like PHY layer) nearly ready, it looks like much of the industry is ready to embrace it as the next step beyond PCI. The DSP community for example has recently shown great interest in RIO as the standard to use for controlling and moving data through large arrays of signal processors, known as "DSP farms." In addition to Motorola, Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, and Agere have all agreed to use RIO as the interface of choice for their next generations of DSPs.
With its ability to work easily with the Infiniband interface spec, and its processor-agnostic architecture, Motorola may have found a strategic marketing tool that makes it more difficult for Intel to attack the embedded systems and communications markets with its own 3GIO/PCI Express bus standard. Given 3GIO's PC-centric architecture, as well as its somewhat-closed community of users, it looks like Intel may have paid for its continued dominance of the desktop market at the expense of the rest of the application spectrum.
A Hopeful Future
But regardless of Intel's fate, Motorola's adoption of RapidIO is emblematic
of its new, open style of business where it is eager to partner with third
parties, and even competitors, to deliver the best possible solutions to
its customers. While it will take some time to turn around a company as
large as the formerly $8-billion collection of divisions that form Motorola's
SPS group, it looks as though the changes are already underway. If the developments
in New Orleans this week are any indicator, Motorola should be enjoying
the fruits of its efforts as it garners new customers and enjoys better
profit margins within the next 12-18 months.
Comments? Questions? Write me at lgoldberg@green-electronics.com.