Try 10 things, 3 of them work, and 1 gives a real insight and sets a new direction.
“Not a computer science project!” That’s how an automotive IC design manager I worked with once described IC design in a product definition meeting. I liked his viewpoint. What he meant was: This is a business, not an academic exercise or homework assignment. There are competitors, customers, and opportunity for success and failure. Despite the massive opportunity for the chip industry, designing silicon for automotive applications also requires multi-million dollar investments that, like any other, must be supported by ROI analysis.
Fig. 1: Slide from “Discontinuities in EE Design” presentation by Mentor CEO Wally Rhines, delivered at IESF event in September in Southeast Michigan; view entire presentation here.
As I see it, any such analysis worth its salt will include answers to these three questions (and many more besides):
Granted, the above is the most cursory sketch of the required technical and financial analysis, one that is frequently confounded by basic structural differences between the car and chip industries. Most obviously, the automotive market typically has five- to seven-year design cycles, while ICs have a Moore’s Law-enshrined 18-month to two-year design cycle, from concept to production. How do you map the two flows together while minimizing risk, maximizing creativity, providing value and differentiation to car OEMs and tier 1s — all whilst keeping within power and cost budgets, and getting the thing to market ahead of your competitors?
The stakes are massive, as many have pointed out. Even the fairly humble automotive microcontroller market is worth around $7B annually, according to Strategy Analytics. Microcontrollers are typically processors with non-volatile memory, usually embedded flash from around 4KB up to 16MB or more. Typically there are around 100 of these sprinkled around the vehicle inside a network of ECUs. They are highly configurable, network-connected (often via the CAN bus) and control, among other things, many of the highly distributed car body electronics and comfort features within the vehicle, such as door locks, sunroof, motor control and lighting. There are three or four big suppliers in the automotive MCU market, each with highly specialized automotive design capability, and the market is competitive. Market share is generally won through adding value at the system level, a task made all the more difficult by requirements like ISO 26262 compliance and lock-step design and redundancy everywhere. How do you beat the competition then?
One way that doesn’t work, or at least shouldn’t be the centerpiece of your strategy, is competing on price. Driving the market to commoditization benefits no one in the supply chain and is the anti-innovation approach. You may win a few points of market share short term but research shows that market share gain in semiconductors has a positive correlation to average selling price. So long-term market share gain is driven by value creation.
The better, if more challenging, way to go is to differentiate on functionality. But this is where the “computer science project” risk comes in. Designing what the marketing team thinks is cool or what the design team thinks is clever doesn’t necessarily translate into something the end customer will pay for.
“Understand the customer problem,” any marketing consultant will tell you. Of course, the consultant is right, at least to a point. But competitive advantage is usually rooted in subtlety, and value-creation comes from trial and error. Try 10 things, 3 of them work, and 1 of those gives a real insight and sets a new direction for the product development strategy. IC designers need freedom to try crazy ideas, but they are more time pressed than most in the organization. So finding ways to let them drift off the standard process path and explore their own gut feel of ‘this might just work’ idea is where real value is created.
In the real world, however, this sort of leeway requires increased productivity so that (over) aggressive schedules can still be hit. This means having the right silicon design tools that facilitate this design exploration process — increasing productivity and simultaneously freeing the inner artist inside the IC designer to invent, create and dazzle. And after this optimized and unique IC is defined, you need the right emulation products to optimize the software (both runtime and software tools), and eventually get to market first with a complete MCU design solution.
Next month, I’ll look at the back end of the process, including how to manage cost in the manufacturing area and more on how design automation tools can give a market advantage. In the meantime, find me on Twitter (@AndyMacleod_MG) and LinkedIn.
Related whitepaper: “Being a Player in the Automotive IC Market.”
Read Macleod’s Nov. 3, 2016 post, “Five Automotive Megatrends.”
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