Getting to market first precludes a wait for a reference design
Pace Micro Technology, as a company that works in the consumer-product market with rapid design cycles, has a unique approach to reference designs.
By Graham Prophet, Editor, EDN Europe -- EDN, November 8, 2007
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Pace Micro Technology, a UK-based developer of digital-TV-delivery technologies and a supplier to the pay-TV industry worldwide, designs and manufactures set-top boxes, personal video recorders, and media gateways for subscription access to TV services through satellite, cable, and IP (Internet Protocol). Its areas of expertise, therefore, take in the latest HD (high-definition) video-decoding standards, encryption of both content and secure-payment systems, and reception and demodulation of multiple digital-signal types, and other factors. Its profile as a leading-edge supplier to the field means that it also must look ahead to the TV-service industry’s emerging business models and be ready with product designs for a rapidly moving consumer market.
Pace, as a company that works in the consumer-product market with rapid design cycles, has a unique approach to reference designs. "There are two basic approaches to the ways companies use reference designs," says Nadeem Ullah, Pace’s silicon-business specialist. "The first is to regard them as a demonstration that the chip or chip set does actually work—that it has the functionality claimed for it. The second approach is to take that design that the silicon vendor has presented, package it, and take it directly to production. Pace’s approach is the first one: We use it as a demonstrator.
"As a leading-edge set-top-box manufacturer, we are working closely with our silicon vendors. [When a new chip is in design], we don’t wait for the IC vendor to get its first silicon to production; we will already be working on our own product design. The silicon vendor will be developing its reference design to show the chip working, but that board design will typically be large and bulky with many test points."
Pace bases its PCB (printed-circuit-board) design on the chip specifications, so production is well-advanced. "Our boards will typically be ready when the silicon is: We can—and do—take the chip maker’s first silicon as soon as it is available and fit it to our boards," Ullah says, noting that in Pace’s market, it cannot afford to wait for the supplied reference design to appear. "There have been cases where [Pace] has supplied one of our initial PCBs to the chip vendor to carry out driver development, as our board design has gone faster than theirs."
The issue of software development for a new chip is critical. At this stage, around the time of first silicon, initial software drivers for the new design are typically not ready, and the IC vendors’ reference designs are the vehicles on which Pace develops these designs, Ullah notes.
As an example of the cooperation he describes, Ullah cites the introduction of the company’s DS810KP, which it supplied to service provider Premiere in Germany to launch the first DVB-S2 H.264 HD service; the product also supports MPEG-2 standard-definition decoding and DVB-S. Pace supplied the product to meet a fixed deadline: Units had to be in the field for the Football (Soccer) World Cup in Germany in 2006, and Pace delivered them in December 2005. Central to the design is an MPEG-4-decoder chip that was the subject of the kind of cooperation between Pace and its silicon suppliers that Ullah says typifies Pace’s development process. Waiting for the chip maker’s reference design, he implies, would have made it unlikely that those soccer matches would have been on viewers’ screens in high definition.
Complete reference designs, ready to take to production, "do fall on our doorstep," Ullah says, "but we don’t pick them up. We leave that approach to the smaller, low-cost, high-volume-product makers: Today, [in the set-top-box market], they are typically the suppliers of volume, free-to-air, low-selling-price boxes."
However, Ullah adds, the chip makers will have done their due diligence in their reference designs, on issues such as layout. "We do take onboard any critical layout points that are apparent and put them into our own PCB designs. But, for a company such as Pace that is selling products in many different markets and has to conform to the regulations that apply in those markets, there’s a lot of key work that’s not part of the standard reference design. Safety and EMC [electromagnetic compatibility] are two of those areas. For example, in its reference design, the silicon vendor will likely not have fully worked through issues such as radiated clocks as a source of EMI [electromagnetic interference]."
With this close relationship to its key silicon suppliers, does Pace use any "classic" ASICs? Ullah says no. The cost is prohibitive, but the chips and chip sets the company employs "are ASICs in the sense that they are very specific to a particular market—for example, set-top boxes with conditional access. They are characterized by more and more integration. We leave that aspect to the silicon suppliers," Ullah says. How does the company achieve sufficient differentiation for its products in the market? "The chip set is only one aspect of the design and the feature set," Ullah observes. "Product features come from the integration of software with the chip set, and, with our closer relationship with our chip suppliers, we do influence what goes into the chip set. In our sector, it’s all about getting those features into the market first."
