Buy a Chip, Get a Board

Back when the mainframe was king, software was free. Then IBM shook things up by unbundling the software from its mainframe products, thus establishing for all time that software actually has value. Nevertheless, the model of using software to sell hardware has persisted for many years in other industry segments. It's a familiar occurrence in the PC business, but that's not the only place. For example, automatic test equipment vendors have traditionally given away program generators and data analysis tools as a means to sell expensive test systems.
Now as a twist on that idea, vendors are giving their customers printed-circuit boards as a means to sell chips. Because of high semiconductor integration, millions of transistors can fit on a single die. Chips have become so complex that they contain most of the intellectual property in a system. Examples include specialized processors, such as video and graphics accelerators, media processors, and communications chips. To induce customers to buy these chips, vendors provide them with the CAD files to build reference platforms. These reference designs are often targeted at specific applications, and consequently, they often wind up as end products. The value that the chip customer adds is all software, which is becoming an effective way to achieve product differentiation.
This reference design strategy has found a place in recent years in the PC business. Who besides Intel designs PC motherboards any more? The speed of the electrons racing around a motherboard these days makes it difficult to control signal quality and emissions, so using a wrung-out design can help you get to market more quickly. Why reinvent a wheel that requires all sorts of expensive design tools if a compliant vendor will give you the plans for that wheel? This strategy is especially friendly to software engineersıyou get an assembly that's been debugged and works. With no annoying hardware problems to deal with, shipping the product on time should be a cinch.
Selling chips is obviously the important thing for a semiconductor vendor, and if providing other system components facilitates the sale, so much the better. At the DSP World Conference in Boston this past October, a product manager for one of the major DSP vendors described a strategy to sell chips similar to the one mentioned above, but with a novel and somewhat retrogressive twist. In order to introduce programmable DSPs into companies that want the technology but don't have the internal software expertise to exploit it, this semiconductor vendor will write the applications code to sell the chips.
Is this a wily move toward bundling software with hardware? I don't think so. While providing applications software may push processor technology into new environmentsıalways a good thingıI doubt that this model will prevail. First, it's labor intensive and can quickly consume all available software resources. Second, it doesn't provide customers the kind of product differentiation that that internal software development could potentially provide. In fact, the product manager said that this strategy only works with consumer products. Manufacturers of industrial products want to write their own code because it represents so much of their added value. For some customers, this strategy may provide an entree into DSP technology. Then, as they gain familiarity with DSPs, they will be able to add value by writing their own code. Lindsey Vereen