Mass Scale Assault

Electronic News, July 9, 2001 by Steven Fyffe

Intel and Analog Devices face off against TI

Intel Corp. may be fashionably late to the wireless space, but along with new best friend Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) and the Micro Signal Architecture (MSA) they developed together, Intel is trying to crash Texas Instruments Inc.'s DSP party.

"The MSA in a sense is a little late to the party, if you consider it what we would call a moderate-performance, low-power DSP targeting mobile communication applications," said Jeff Bier, general manager of Berkeley Design Technology Inc., Berkeley, Calif. "On the other hand, it has some unique features that may give it a real advantage in this applications space."

Even as Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel (nasdaq: INTC) struggles to remake itself as a communications company, it can't quite bring itself to admit it is in the DSP business, said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts of Tempe, Ariz.

"Intel is now moving headlong into communications, realizing the bloom is off the rose in the PC market," Strauss said. "Now that Intel has this new religion of communication, they realize they are working with signals. They are embracing the DSP architecture, but they don't like it. The terminology of DSP has been anathema within Intel."

Intel has a different spin.

"The wireless sector is moving into Intel's domain, as opposed to Intel moving into wireless," said Dennis Sheehan, director of marketing for Intel's Cellular Communications division. "It's really the evolution of the wireless market segment as it moves from being voice only to voice and data ... What it's going to take to make these applications real is much more computing and much more memory. It is moving into Intel's space by being much more data driven. It's a lot more aligned with what Intel has been good at for the past 25 years."

Market Model Strategies

The term "Micro Signal Architecture" isn't an attempt to side-step the DSP label, but an accurate description of the hybrid functions the architecture has achieved, Sheehan said. The three main advantages of the MSA are strong support for 8-bit operations, the ability to scale voltage on the fly and a relatively benign architecture for software development, Berkeley Design's Bier said.

Intel and Analog Devices (nyse: ADI) are hoping those advantages will be enough lure customers away from popular TI (nyse: TXN) products in both generic and application-specific markets.

Norwood, Mass.-based Analog Devices has already announced a family of 16-bit DSPs based on the MSA architecture called Blackfin. The Blackfin family of off-the shelf DSPs will compete with what TI calls its catalog business.

Intel has said it has no plans to enter the generic DSP market. Instead, the company is planning a series of products for the handheld wireless space that combine the MSA with its XScale microprocessor--a similar approach to TI's OMAP baseband processor with its C55x DSP core and ARM9 microprocessor core.

Like the StarCore, which Motorola Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. (now Agere Systems Inc.) co-developed, the MSA highlights some important weaknesses in TI's sole-source business model. Since Dallas-based TI doesn't let other companies make DSPs using its designs; if it can't deliver, customers have nowhere else to go.

"People understandably get a little nervous when it is a sole-source situation, and that is one of TI's vulnerabilities," Bier said. "If you are a major equipment maker buying DSPs from TI, you are totally dependent on TI for those DSPs because no other manufacturer can supply DSPs that use the TI architectures. In the Intel/Analog case, conceptually at least, there are now two vendors out there supporting the MSA architecture ... This could give OEMs a sense of some negotiating power and security that if somebody's fab catches on fire they can get silicon from a second source."

Analog Devices is touting the benefits of a dual-source strategy.

"The engine we have created with each other will stay compatible with each other's products, which helps the industry and our customers," said Mark Gill, product line manager in the DSP division of Analog Devices. "Now they can develop code on an Intel chip and migrate that to an ADI chip, if they chose."

But on the flip side, competition for common customers could cause friction between Intel and Analog Devices, according to Leon Adams, manager of DSP strategic marketing at TI. Analog Devices decided it was better to compete for attention on Intel's side of the court, rather than to face-off against the world's most dominant chipmaker, Gill said.

"There's not a gentleman's agreement or a contractual obligation (not to compete)," Gill said. "The law tells us we have to compete in the market without any restrictions. I think Analog and Intel will find common marketplaces very attractive. There will be an area of overlap, and we shouldn't shy away from that, but we think there will be many areas that are not overlapping.

"When Analog Devices found out that Intel wanted a DSP product, we wanted to be involved. We figured it was better to compete with Intel on our side than compete against Intel and somebody else."