Editor at large: an interview with Gene Frantz, Texas Instruments.

ECN-Electronic Component News, March, 2005 by Miller, Jean

System on chip has come a long way, baby, and Gene Frantz of Texas Instruments has seen its future in the success of the Personal Video Recorder (PVR). When he visited a typical PVR provider in early 2000, he asked for a bill of material and found that no two circuits in the system were from the same vendor. "I call that 'design by Google'," he said. "There were as many different vendors as there were devices." He added that within two or three generations, the number of devices could be cut down to as few as two. And, sooner or later, the number of devices will be cut to just one."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

"As an electronic designer, why would I not want to start with one vendor?" Frantz asked. "If my goal is to someday have a single chip device,...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Premium Content Partnership | HighBeam Research provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.