Modular development assistance and differentiation

Xilinx Inc. made almost as much noise over its Targeted Design Platform introduced Feb. 2 as it did over the new families of Virtex-6 and Spartan-6. The concept of going beyond single-board development kits to a tight bundle of embedded boards, software, and firmware is nothing new. But Xilinx’s layered approach to characterizing development platforms to a domain (say, connectivity) and a market (e.g., data center Ethernet) represents a new level of assistance at a time of reduced engineering staff.

The task for Xilinx in proliferating TDP will be to remind customers to preserve some level of true internal DIY ingenuity and differentiation, or risk becoming too much like a white-box ODM. It is attractive to leave the task of differentiation entirely to the semiconductor supplier. But vendors in the processor industry who have tried this trick, Broadcom for example, have found that some customers are more than willing to use the IC supplier as a virtual board supplier. The danger in becoming a virtual ODM is that sooner or later, your reason for existence as a company relies on pretty thin justification. Nortel, for example, went from relying on Flextronics for supply, to being a primary software supplier for externally-developed boards, to succumbing to existential angst. Xilinx customers don’t want to go there.

Is the TDP useful and at times necessary? Absolutely. Let’s look at the case where an XML call must be associated with a lower-level TCP/IP function. Programmers who fully understand the vagaries of all seven layers of the OSI reference model are becoming harder and harder to find. It’s one thing to turn to a third-party protocol stack specialist, but Xilinx’s layered model allows the company and its partners to provide such tools pre-bundled.

The base TDP platform includes the FPGA itself, the ISE design environment, third-party EDA tools, reference designs and reference boards, and cores common to several domains, such as PCI Express and Ethernet. On top of the base, the domain-specific platform adds middleware and mezzanine cards specific to realms such as embedded control or DSP. Finally, market-specific platforms will add software, reference designs, and the like for mil-aero, consumer, automotive, industrial and other domains.

Just remember: An important step in differentiation must remain in your hands. If the Xilinx TDP is employed to offer production-level boards that are easily tweaked from a market-specific TDP, you have become a virtual ODM – and you can easily be replaced