New applications push out other silicon

Electronic News, Jan 5, 1998 by Will Wade, Gale Morrison

Mountain View, Calif.--If it's got silicon inside, there's the potential to use a digital signal processor (DSP). That's the news from the DSP market, where the trend for 1998 is pretty much the same as it was in 1997: more and more applications for the technology, often running better and costing less than traditional silicon products.

This year, DSPs will make further inroads into replacing microcontrollers, especially in motor control applications. Sales of programmable DSPs, offering flexibility to OEMs and easy upgrades for end-users, are also expected to grow strongly. Overall, the DSP industry is facing a promising year, and total growth is expected to beat the total semiconductor growth figures.

"The history of the DSP is of seeing the technology spread from expert users to diffuse through the mainstream markets," said Mike Hames, VP of the semiconductor group and worldwide DSP manager for Texas Instruments. "We think the DSP market is going through the same process that the microprocessor market went through five to 10 years ago."

Will Strauss, president of DSP market research firm Forward Concepts, agrees that the future of DSP is to be found in emerging applications. "New applications are always the big issue in this business." Some of the hot markets include digital cameras, medical imaging, communications, sensors, motor control and home appliances. But Mr. Strauss noted that this is just the tip of the iceberg and people come up with new ideas almost every day. One of his recent favorite DSP ideas uses the technology for detecting buried plastic land mines. "Not a huge volume device, but very useful," Mr. Strauss pointed out.

He predicts overall growth of about 30 percent for DSPs this year, and a five-year cumulative growth rate of nearly 36 percent. Unit shipments were up 52 percent in 1997, although prices were down 17 percent partly because of tight pricing in the DRAM market and strong competition in some of the major DSP segments.

For the moment, DSP applications are limited more by imagination than by the technology, and people are dreaming up new applications every day. TI has spent the past year refocusing its entire corporate strategy towards DSP, and is clearly the dominant force in the industry. The company made two major investments last year to push the rest of the world toward DSP technology, a $100 million venture capital fund for DSP startup companies and a $25 million university fund to support educational efforts in the DSP arena.

Growth Rates Of 40%

Mr. Hames said programmable DSPs could see growth rates of up to 40 percent per year for the next five years. Part of this comes from electronic devices which can be upgraded through software. A prime example of this is 56 kilobit-per-second modems, all of which will be adapted to meet the International Telecommunication Standard which is expect to be approved early next month.

A less obvious application for programmable DSPs is household appliances which allow OEMs to design several different models using a single DSP-based platform. DSPs are already beginning to replace standard microcontrollers for motor control, and Mr. Hames said this will continue to be a hot market. "This is not the sexiest business area, but there are 10 to 20 billion motors made every year and this is an area to make a lot of money," he said. "To me, boring is beautiful."

Cheaper And Better With A DSP

Not only are DSPs driving new markets, they are also being positioned as replacement parts, especially for microcontrollers. "People are finding a lot of things you can do with a microcontroller can be done cheaper and better with a DSP," said Mr. Strauss.

One result of DSPs' versatility is that DSP cores are being embedded into numerous other chips, said Irving Gold, VP of marketing and sales at DSP Group. "People are starting to recognize the value of DSP," he said, "and we will eventually see DSP cores on other chips."

Adding DSP blocks to microprocessors and microcontrollers adds more capabilities to the chips, and sometimes is more efficient than adding a dedicated DSP chip to a system, he noted. Some of the areas where he expects to see more embedded DSPs are disk drives, set-top boxes and consumer electronics. DSP Group expects to release its Teak core this year, a follow-up to its Oak line; and its next generation Palm core is due in early 1999.

Analog Devices Inc. (ADI) is another company that, along with TI, targets the general purpose DSP market. The company competes with TI in every DSP market, a spokesman said.

According to Jerry McGuire, manager of the 32-bit "Sharc" line, the competition in the low cost, 32-bit floating point DSP segment will heat up further as ADI will "be doing broad announcements that will define customers and applications across lots of consumer and 'near-consumer' appliances." With this planned 1998 release, ADI will have "a lower cost floating point, 32-bit product competing head-to-head with the low cost floating point offering from TI and with the 24-bit, fixed point DSP from Motorola," he said.