GUEST EDITORIAL

 

SoC Design success: Winning with Standards

 

Ian Mackintosh

President, OCP-IP

It is inevitable that the SoC Design industry will address increasingly brutal time-to-market cycles and productivity demands by breaking away from the proprietary clutches of individual suppliers. And, the road to this maturity and success will be paved with open standards.

Today, most corporations grow by the pursuit of a product-driven strategy that begins with the development of a Native product (see Figure 1). As competition increases there is an inevitable progression to add ¡°Value¡± to this offering which thins out competitive ranks and fuels the survivors¡¯ success and usually, growth. Inevitably, consolidation continues in the segment, the product offerings get more and more comprehensive and becoming what Geoffrey Moore has coined as ¡°Whole¡± products. The path progression is generally predictable and indeed brings much success to the short list of surviving companies.

This growth model holds well for most industries. The speed with which these offerings evolve can serve early markets well, enabling many larger users to abandon more poorly developed and high-cost internal offerings in their favor. Other (often smaller) users are empowered by these offerings to enter markets they could otherwise not address. But what comes next and is there a penalty associated with this approach (See Figure 2)?  If we consider the long-term effect on market growth, it is easy to conclude that although this approach has real value to users (and certainly fuels the corporate growth of providers), we are ultimately headed for a wall.

The reality is that the provision of these ¡°whole products¡± not done with the goal of providing the best possible solution, but of capturing the largest market-share with the minimum resources possible. Inevitably, these ¡®whole products¡¯ take on such vast proportions that they are comprised not by ¡®best of breed¡¯ constituent parts, but by what can readily be provided to minimally serve the customers needs. The actual content of these whole product offerings inevitably spread into new technical territories for their providers, areas where their expertise can be weak and often second-rate. The result is ¡°adequate offerings,¡± that although generally superior to the weak preceding internal offerings of the larger consumers, are still short of the mark in providing excellent solutions to the market.

Clearly we need to mix and match ¡°best of breed¡± solutions from those suppliers expert in the provision of the individual components that make up the infrastructure surrounding these often excellent, core products. And the solution is quite apparent; we must center product offerings around key standards. It is THIS style of approach that ultimately dominates industries, matures them and enables the required level of productivity and growth to be attained (See Figure 1, ¡°Infrastructure¡± phase).

The analogies for the maturing SoC design industry are obvious. We have market segments served by companies in every phase of development (again, see Figure1) and the result is the infamous ¡°design productivity design gap,¡± which can best be closed by collaboration on standards that will energize the growth and productivity essential to address TTM and success-rate demands of the electronics industry. Standards are central to optimizing SoC design success.

There are many signs of industry awareness and collaborations do exist. Although it is not possible to single out more than a handful of truly ¡°universal standards¡± in the SoC design space, it is clear that groups of companies are now banding together to take on problems they see as ¡°bigger than themselves,¡± or, certainly too large to take on without a divide and conquer approach.  Some movements have been around longer than others and have enjoyed differing levels of success and failure. Examples are: STARC, OCP-IP, VSIA, Spirit, Si2, VCX and so on, all with rather different missions, infrastructures and objectives. Most efforts represent the practical alliance of an originally small grouping of Corporations, with their efforts centered upon fast returns in a few areas, or establishing interface boundaries between themselves and others in the group, to permit more efficient sharing on ¡°a couple of fronts¡± and solve some immediate problems, on a finite scale. Some of these organizations have subsequently grown considerably. In itself this is a positive approach and history says that as the resulting solutions are made more openly available, they can often evolve into broader ¡°industry¡± standards. Perhaps not the most comprehensive, organized and rapid approach, but better than no standards at all!

Interestingly, it is possible to do MUCH better than this, if an environment exists where standards can be rapidly laid down with some certainty of adoption. It seems that much of the burgeoning ASIAN SoC design community may well be able to take advantage of the newness of their industry to lay such foundations, providing they are fully aware of lessons learned about the real nature of standards and what it takes to get them rapidly deployed and adopted in a high-tech community. The success of standards depends on how they are defined, implemented and the nature of participation in these activities. Let us consider some pointers surrounding these issues.

Firstly, Standards need to be treated like products. More than this, they should be defined as products that fulfill a market need, rather than be created because they are readily implementable and seem important. There is a fundamental need for true product marketing in this definition process and it is essential that the whole activity is ¡°market driven,¡± rather than ¡°product driven,¡± as is typical of the high-tech arena. So, a standard should exist in the context of the many other standards that should make up the entire ¡°suite¡± of standards. More than this, standards must been seen in the light of their application and use. It is insufficient for a standard to be ¡®just a paper document,¡¯ as this will bring no assurance it can and will be used productively. More ideally, a standard is a specification AND the tools, support, training and often multi-faceted, broad-based infrastructure essential for its productive and prolific deployment to the community it serves.

Next, it is essential we are sensitive to the balance and mix of infrastructure we provide to surround any given standard. Just because one standard really needs an introductory training program, hot-line support, exhaustive documentation and compliance tools, does NOT mean that every standard requires the same. Some standards are incredibly simple and self-evident, so require less hands-on support, but almost ALL standards will have users who need to ramp fast and get answers quickly and cannot afford long delays to get answers. So, efficient support is normally key, but the mix and extent of infrastructure surrounding a standard can vary wildly. This of course means that the way infrastructure is developed around a series of standards must be well-planned ahead of time and the supporting organization must have the inherent flexibility to configure and deliver the very varied infrastructure surrounding individual standards.

Finally, the nature of cooperation and collaboration in defining, developing and delivering standards is key. Participants must be committed and available. Standards are not things that are ¡°nice¡± to have in an efficient SoC design process;  indeed they are the  essential foundations upon which all else is built. In a more productive world, engineers either develop standards or use them. It is imperative that the brightest and best engineers are available to build these foundations and that they are capable of working in a collaborative and productive fashion with individuals they might in many ways see as competitors. Sharing with a competitor is a mature behavior that must be FULLY embraced for all parties to grow, progress and thrive from the collaboration. It is particularly important that those leaders contributing such skilled professionals to the combined effort not only make them fully available, but also commission their work with a productive sense of it¡¯s importance and the high value of a shared and common outcome.

Clearly, standards are essential to a rapidly advancing SoC design industry. Their nature is such that in most ways they are ¡°just another type of product¡± and so should be subject to similar product marketing practices. More than this, when standards are planned a great portion of their successful deployment will be determined by the accompanying supporting infrastructure and the suitability of the supporting organization to deliver this in an appropriate manner. As standards become the foundations for successful industries, so then must the developers and providers of these standards be sensitive to the value of collaboration in moving all participants forward to success in a shared objective.

In summary, standards themselves are often misunderstood and indeed many existing ¡°standards bodies¡± often fail to recognize the basic nature of their work (much of which is described above) and indeed continue to founder on some or many of these fundamental principals. The good news is that awareness is growing and organizations will adapt to the basic principals and structure that it takes to successfully develop and deploy their standards.

It is clear that for industries to grow, companies must move away from a model that is inward-looking and centered purely on internal resources, to a larger outward approach of collaboration that should be centered on open standards and broad industry support. Individual standards might vary widely, but is clear that the SoC Design industry will not attain the productivity required for their demanding markets, without paving the way with well-defined ¡®products¡¯ and very effective deployment organizations.