Freescale's Lisa Su: Embedding opportunity
By Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News -- EDN, March 30, 2009
Lisa Su, Freescale Semiconductor's senior VP and general manager, networking and multimedia, and CTO, recently spoke with Electronic Business about focusing on opportunity in a challenged embedded market, connected intelligence and the role of netbooks, and how multicore and scaling costs fit in. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.
Electronic Business: What's challenging embedded right now?
Su: The embedded world has a couple of challenges, but it also a couple of opportunities. In terms of challenges we are always looking at how we get to more performance, less power, and less costs for all of our applications. In particular, if you look at the power performance challenges, it really is one of those areas where you have to look for new ways to differentiate because the old ways are not returning as much bang for the buck. So the embedded world is really about how to do more with less and certainly about how to get products to market faster. That's currently the biggest focuses from a technology standpoint.
From a global economy standpoint, I think everyone in the semiconductor industry is watching what's going on in the marketplace and what that means to each of our businesses. One of the things that we always look for is the silver lining. We certainly didn't make the economic crisis. Although the semiconductor industry is very volatile, this downturn certainly feels very different because it's not about semiconductors, it's not about technology, it's really something broader than that. What I've been looking at are what bright spots we can focus on so that we are able to capitalize and come out much stronger at the other end.
Electronic Business: You just mentioned doing more with less and getting to market faster. How does multicore fit into that?
Su: Multicore is everywhere in that. The challenge in networks is how do we get more connectivity and infrastructure out into the market place in every region of the world at the lowest possible investment levels. You see, for instance, what's going on in China with the acceleration of some of the 3G infrastructure build out. The challenge there is how do we get more performance at lower power and at lower cost. Multicore is a big piece of that. You, of course, must look at scaling into smaller and smaller geometries. Because you get a large advantage from the geometry change, multicore is additive on top of the technology advantage. Multicore takes advantage of the ability to do operations in parallel and whether you are talking about the signal-processing side or the computing side, it's really thinking about how do we get two engines, four engines, six engines to run in parallel. It's a big piece of that performance/power equation, especially in infrastructure. Anything that you are able to run in parallel, really benefits from multicore.
Electronic Business: Are scaling costs challenging right now?
Su: We've done some analysis on technologies and what you see is a dichotomy or a little bit of a separation between the users and the technology. You are always going to have the DRAM vendors and the compute-centric processor vendors that are going to be moving down the technology path very fast. Yes, scaling costs are higher, but you are able to amortize it off of lots and lots of units in high volume and so they are always going to push that. In the embedded space, we are a little bit different because we have a lot of different applications that use technologies at different times. In the networking business, we are going on to 45 nanometer. In the automotive business, our primary technology node today is 90 nanometer. In the industrial and analog type businesses, there's still a lot of opportunities at much higher geometries.
We go at a different pace and we also do a lot of customization for applications. When you do customization for applications, you have a number of different products versus a few parts. As you go from 90 to 65 to 45 nanometer, certainly the cost of doing a chip has gone up just given mask costs and design costs. I do think you are going to see fewer unique products as you go into smaller geometries and that has a few implications for us. One is that it is more important to do integration. It's also more important to continue to evolve the packaging content, as well. So packaging becomes equally important in trying to get cost-competitive products out there.
Electronic Business: How does software fit into all of this?
Su: Software is really an enabler to the hardware technology. We used to develop these two things separately and it's now become much more important to develop these things together and in parallel. That's the only way that you can get all of the performance that is required, as well as getting products out to market faster. Once again, the embedded space is pretty unique. Because of the diversity of our applications, you can have very simple stuff and you can have very complex stuff with tens of millions of lines of code. We tend to need to operate in different environments, so it will have an environment that is proprietary. For instance, if you are running a smart meter in your home, you have some [technologies] that are going to be very, very proprietary and you want to take advantage of generally available applications, as well. That is a unique software challenge in the embedded market.
Electronic Business: While we are on smart meters, how do you see the opportunity for green technology for the embedded market?
Su: It is certainly very much of a growth area. Green technology has become sort of what you can do in terms of the electric grid and smart-metering opportunities. Then it's being able to harvest energy better -- so solar power and wind power -- and that can very much benefit from embedded electronics. And then it's just the basic efficiencies of how can you run your server data center in a much more power-efficient way. Those are the aspects of green.
Green is everywhere. We've certainly heard it talked about a lot. But it's gaining momentum, particularly relative to all of the investments that are taking place. After the oil crisis last summer, it feels like the initiatives to get to hybrid vehicles and renewable energy are very much taking hold in this country.
Electronic Business: Do you believe all of the talk about green technology creating a new swell of new tech jobs?
Su: I don't like to over use things and I think sometimes we do. Sometimes I feel like we attach too much to green. I think it's a very natural evolution of our technology capability.
Electronic Business: You just mentioned hybrid vehicles. How does opportunity for embedded look in the currently struggling automotive market?
Su: Today the automotive market probably isn't the most popular market to be in considering what's going on with the auto makers. But if you look long term, the automobile is really an extension of our home or our office. Look at the opportunities available to really move the technology forward and you have everything in terms of the efficiency of the car and the safety aspects -- those are amazing technical feats to be able to get into place and we can all imagine how that can change our lives. Then you have the infotainment portion of it, which is how to get every single piece of information in a car that is available in a home or office. It is a platform that truly is going to grow in the future. It's just a matter of brining the technology elements together.
Electronic Business: Consumer spending is down significantly. How do you feel about the opportunity in consumer electronics right now?
Su: I think consumer electronics ties to this notion of "connected intelligence." We all have a desire to have access to information at any time, in any place, in any form. To do that, we require the network infrastructure and we require the consumer devices that are there. Clearly, there is still a lot of innovation in consumer devices. There is still a lot of capability. It's driven by ensuring that we get to the lowest possible costs on these devices. As the costs come down as technology generations get more advanced, we are going to see more different form factor devices.
Electronic Business: In October 2008, Freescale announced its plans to exit the cellular chipset business. How is that going to impact what the company can do in connected intelligence, if in any way?
Su: It's a different focus. The cellular chipset business is one where there is a lot of consolidation. From a pure modem standpoint, there are going to be a few places you can get modems from. But when I look at connected intelligence, it's a bigger view than that. As we look at it, it starts from the infrastructure and ensuring that the infrastructure is extremely capable. We've been talking about 3G technology for a while, but we really are just starting to see widespread deployment of 3G here in the United States and overseas. There's an incredible amount of growth in that portion of let's call it 3G and beyond networks. That's a big part of the connected-intelligence vision, so you have to have the infrastructure there. In terms of the consumer devices, we believe they will be a lot of different devices with a lot of different capabilities. All of them have processors. You'll see that these devices not only will have processors, but will have advanced sensors and sensing capability and all of those are things that we [Freescale] work on.
Electronic Business: Freescale made a big move into the netbook market in January and then quickly expanded on that with a 3G offering and additional operating system options for the i.MX515 processor. What's your opinion of netbooks as connected-intelligence devices?
Su: We believe netbooks are a very interesting market. I put it in this whole realm of next-generation devices. These will coexist with the other devices we have today. They really benefit from good processor capability, good low-power capability, and good graphics capability. We've come at it from the view of we're designing products that will fit nicely into a number of embedded applications. People want choices.
Electronic Business: At what point do netbooks stop coexisting with PCs and smart phones? PCs are becoming so lightweight and so cost and power efficient, and smart phones seem to get smarter and less expensive every quarter.
Su: In my personal opinion, I don't think we will ever get down to everyone has one device because there is so much richness in the user experience that you get from a user interface. I think you are going to have these devices coexisting with different types of specialties. That's my view of the world.
Electronic Business: Any other thoughts, Lisa?
Su: Yes, perhaps one message. I believe this is a time to be pretty optimistic about where technology fits into the world, particularly in the embedded space. You can really get yourself down if all you look at is the day to day. But I think this is an opportunity to accelerate technology. That's the theme that we are on -- how do we accelerate some of these technologies to market.
For previous interviews with Lisa Su, visit this page .
