October 9, 1997

What's the future of circuit design?

Although we may long for the glory days of circuit design, today's reality is that system-level ICs are the right solution to most circuit requirements.

A recent cover story in Electronic Business Today discussed the shift in the business balance of power between IC suppliers and OEMs (Reference 1). The article points out that as ICs embed more and more system functions within, the OEM contributes less original design work and has reduced profitability. In contrast, the IC vendors make large margins by providing more of the design.

This issue is related to business and is not of direct interest to EDN, but the design implications are. In traditional circuit design, engineers use discrete devices, small-scale ICs, and passive components in unique and innovative circuit topologies and configurations to yield the desired system performance. In system design, engineers combine preset functional blocks of ICs to achieve the system goals, often following standard configurations.

You've all seen cases in which one cleverly used component replaces several parts or neatly solves several conflicting design objectives; often, this component is a passive part or a single transistor, op amp, or gate. However, the need for this kind of circuit design is diminishing. Systems on a chip mean that the designer's role is to select relatively high-level functional blocks and ensure that their timings and interfaces are compatible and that the software properly manages them. If you use a chip set from one vendor, much of this work is done for you as well. Although we may long for the glory days of circuit design, when an engineer could combine a handful of components in a circuit that outdid all competitive circuits in performance and cost, today's reality is that system-level ICs are the right solution for most circuit requirements.

This "siliconization" or "GaAs-ification" of systems has major implications for the design engineer. What tools do you need to select and model these components? How do you test them in your application? What do you when you need functionality that is similar to but not quite the same as what these components offer? How do you get the right expertise on your project team? What engineering skills do you need in the next few years? What do you need to know about passive devices and their application when you need so few of them? How do you make your final product stand out in the crowd if all your competitors have access to the same high-level ICs and chip sets and will be using them in pretty much the same way?

For digital designs, the trend toward more on a chip is relentless. No engineer would design a megabyte memory using kilobyte ICs. For analog and RF functions, the situation is less clear-cut. Although you can get more of these nondigital functions on one IC, a clever circuit designer may be able to use a 50-cent transistor in just the right way to produce a function, such as a modulator, that outperforms a function embedded within a system-level analog IC. Is guerrilla circuit design from competitors going to be the unexpected challenge you face?

Reference

1. Ristelhueber, Robert, "Who needs the OEM?" Electronic Business Today, April 1997.

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