Reference designs improve but don’t always offer full performance
In Korea, reference designs greatly affect the success of product development.
By Jade Jin, Executive Editor, EDN Korea -- EDN, November 8, 2007
|
Related Article:
Reference designs worldwide: understanding the IP imbalance |
In Korea, reference designs greatly affect the success of product development. Because the reference design can minimize design risks and enhance the reliability of end applications as well as reduce a development period, the reliance on such designs is escalating. Recently, the quality of chip vendors’ reference designs has improved greatly. The vendors are providing more detailed and diverse information, ranging from detailed specs of the parts in use to complete schematics of the designs. The vendors often supply these reference designs in virtually the same form factors as the end application requires.
"The latest reference designs have excellent quality in both software and hardware, and the functional verification is already complete," says Jongowan Kim, senior researcher of the application-technology laboratory at the telecommunication R&D center of Samsung Electronics. "So, reference designs are being used for developing almost all products."
Reference designs are also helpful when design teams move to a new chip or processor platform. "Since I have been working on a development project based on microprocessors for the first time, I have encountered difficulties," says Seongu Kim, assistant manager at the multimedia R&D center of Hyundai Autonet. The company uses reference designs for microprocessors to develop the terminals of Hyundai Motor Co. "But the reference design has been very helpful," he says. But Kim also indicated that "the detailed descriptions of each part of the design and appropriate software have been lacking."
Seokjin Pang, assistant manager for the hardware team at the R&D center of Kiryung Electronics, uses a reference design based on the Texas Instruments TMS320DM270 for the S-DMB (satellite-digital-multimedia-broadcasting) application for vehicles. "Since data provided by chip vendors are used for references for establishing the basics, partial modification is inevitable, considering the variety and reality of end applications," he says. "But the use of reference design ranges from 50 to 90%, depending on the application."
The evolution of reference designs has also greatly affected the development environments of manufacturers. Also, the quality of reference designs is an important criterion for selecting a chip. "As the lifetime of products gets shorter, pressure on reducing a development period is getting stronger," says David Yoon, chief engineer at the mobile-communication laboratory of LG Electronics. "If an excellent reference design is used, products could be developed with minimum R&D personnel in addition to the reduction of the development period. So, it is a very important resource for enterprises. Since the advance verification of a reference design has been done and the know-how of chip vendors has been confirmed, it is very helpful for engineers to review a reference design and to make the most of it," he says.
However, a reference design can have limitations as a chip-focused demonstration board. "For most of the reference designs, tests for each case are not performed in actual environments," says Kyung-Fan Shin, senior engineer at the overseas HSDPA (high-speed-downlink-packet-access)-development group of Pantech. "So, products frequently cannot be used since some functions are not implemented properly. Often, the design is modified or a separate chip is used. Chip vendors need to verify reference designs in more diverse environments."
