Hitachi has reorganized and is developing system-on-a-chip technologies around 10 product areas that cater toward Hitachi's traditional strengths.

Shiro Baba, director of Hitachi's System LSI division, plans to leverage product areas where the company's system expertise is competitive; he looks at the electronics industry like a poker player studying his cards and figures he has a decent hand.

The ten product areas include hard disk drives, digital cell phones, smart cards, power ICs, DVD and CD-ROM drives, set-top boxes and digital TVs, mobile computers, car-navigation systems, consumer products such as digital audio, and linear and mixed-signal solutions

"The U.S. has its strengths, but please don't forget our strengths," said Baba, a former MPU designer who is now in charge of Hitachi. Known for its technological skills, Hitachi has been hit by plummeting DRAM prices and is in need of a strong showing from its system IC efforts.

"We are aiming to be more flexible," said Baba, who argues in fluent English that the availability of commercial intellectual property (IP) cores will benefit a large company like Hitachi. "We have good microcontrollers, memory, and linear and mixed-signal technology," he said. "The trend toward globalization and the ability to source IP from outside will definitely help us to integrate solutions for our customers."

Hitachi recently appointed Tadashi Ishibashi, who formerly headed the LCD and electronic tube division, to lead the company's semiconductor and IC operations. Toshimasa Kihara is now in charge of the overall system LSI group.

Stability in turbulent times is one attribute Hitachi can claim, Baba argued in an interview in Tokyo. "Texas Instruments bought SSI [Silicon Systems Inc.], but a lot of people left. Companies start up and then close, but our customers know that basically Hitachi will be in Tokyo forever," he said. "We will develop the SH-5 microprocessor, then the sixth generation, and so on. Our customers value the fact that we can keep our people."

Baba said that MIPS licensees are currently concerned about "the SGI problem," following Silicon Graphics Inc.'s decision to base its high-end systems partly on Intel-architecture CPUs.

Hitachi also has moved to license its SH architecture to ensure customers "a meaningful second source" for SH-centric designs. STMicroelectronics in Europe, VLSI Technology in the United States, and Seiko-Epson and Sony in Japan have licensed the SH cores. Hitachi plans to emphasize its ability to add flash memory and DRAM to its SH and H-8 cores, with customers currently clamoring for on-board flash.

"In many cases, on-chip DRAM is still at an experimental stage, and it is relatively expensive to implement," Baba said. "But for power savings, it has advantages, and the DSC [digital still camera] customers are looking at it."

Besides looking forward to developing markets such as DSCs, Hitachi is applying its integration skills to mature products, such as video-cassette recorders. Its VCR chip set now consists of an analog device and a microcontroller-based digital device for motor control. Other targets include an automotive engine control IC, using the SH MCU and flash memory, and chip sets for smart cards and handheld computers.

Tsugio Makimoto, who ran Hitachi's IC division for much of the last decade, said Japan's semiconductor and computer managers are looking to "newly developed nomadic computing systems as a way to be free of the Wintel framework. These portable systems are appropriate to our SH architecture, so we are looking at intelligent portable terminals, communications and handheld computers. These kinds of systems are very important to the overall reenergizing of the Japanese economy."

Makimoto said Japan needs clear-cut targets that are not dominated by Intel and Microsoft. "Right now the semiconductor business is very difficult," he said. "But our ability to add flash and DRAM to our SH processors will give Hitachi a very high level of field programmability, and that will help us throughout the 21st century."