In some ways, developers of DSP systems, chips and software are no further along today than the auto industry was in 1908. Much of their effort is expended in reinventing commonplace components instead of building features that create product differentiation and add value-and this despite the typical constraints of short design cycles and limited engineering resources.

Why don't product developers rely more heavily on preexisting components? Much of the answer lies in the difficulty of obtaining and integrating components from disparate vendors.

Fortunately, processor vendors seem to be taking notice of this situation. For example, Motorola and Telcordia recently announced the availability of a "feature phone" solution that includes a processor, voice-coding and network-interface software, and development support. Similarly, Texas Instruments recently introduced its "reference frameworks" family of productiongrade software templates that provide the basic nuts and bolts needed to integrate product-specific code with third-party algorithms, hardware drivers and so on. These products promise to shift development from critical but nondifferentiating components to value-added features.

Perhaps the most important benefit of this "prepackaged" approach is that it lowers the technical barriers of entry. Suppose a company with little DSP expertise wants to add DSP features to an existing product. Developing this expertise in-house may be prohibitively time-consuming and expensive, making an off-the-shelf solution attractive. As DSP features are merged into a range of embedded applications, this scenario is likely to become common, and processor vendors that can provide the right mix of hardware, software and development support stand to gain an upper hand.

Jeff Bier is the General Manager of Berkeley Design Technology Inc. (www.bdti.com), a DSP Technology Analysis and Software Development Company. Kenton Williston of BDTI contributed to this column.