EINDHOVEN, Netherlands — Philips Semiconductors is rolling out a corporate-wide "platform strategy"that seeks to deploy a common design methodology and common process technologies among all groups within the company. The strategy is a linchpin of Philips' effort to build a successful business model for reusable hardware and software.

In pursuit of the holy grail of reusable cores, "we've just finished rearranging the organization," said Guenther Dengel, managing director of consumer systems at Philips Semiconductors.

The new business model, which has been two years in the making, targets digital TVs, telecommunications handsets and digital audio as the first applications for the company's platform strategy. The mission of the consumer-systems group is "to make sure that if there is an audio block developed by one group within Philips Semiconductors, for example, it can be dropped into a system design being designed by another group," Dengel said.

The whole process-requiring painful steps at times-has affected "more than 300 technical managers running Philips Semiconductors' operations," including sites in Nijmegen, Netherlands; Caen, France; Southampton, U.K.; Hamburg, Germany; and Taipei, Taiwan, Dengel said. Those operations-formerly divided by geographic boundaries and along such technological lines as RF, audio or other ICs for TVs, microcontrollers or digital video-are now far more horizontally organized and integrated, lining up behind specific products or projects.

Theo Claasen, chief technology officer at Philips Semiconductors, said in a recent interview with EE Times that there is no such thing as a general-purpose architecture that fits all digital consumer products. Nonetheless, he said, it is possible to identify an architecture that's generic enough to suit such varied application domains as digital video, audio and telecommunications terminals.

"Without a [common] architecture, reuse of software and hardware modules becomes impossible," Claasen said.

The goal-which Philips shares with many other silicon vendors-is to find the quickest and most effective way to design the most flexible and economical silicon solution for each application category. Design reusability is a virtual mandate under such conditions, particularly as products grow more complex, with some chips containing more than 10 million transistors and with on-chip software increasingly requiring 100,000 to 1 million lines of code. Further, time-to-market has shrunk to less than six months, even as the market demands more variants of basic chip architectures.

According to Claasen, building a silicon system platform with reusable software and hardware components is "just like building a prefabricated house with reusable walls, pillars, roofs and windows." He warned, however, that one must first think through an architecture, to allow for design flexibility while ensuring design integrity.

The key elements of a silicon system platform include the hardware (CPU, digital signal processor and coprocessor); software (operating system, application programming interface, drivers and specific software modules); interface structures; development tools; and process technology. Claasen outlined what Philips Semiconductors has identified as core modules for two product categories: digital TVs/set-top boxes and telecom terminals.

For the digital-TV platform, Philips Semiconductors has chosen a MIPS CPU core and a TriMedia DSP in what Claasen called a dual-processor approach. While the DTV platform is a MIPS-based architecture, he said, the TriMedia DSP can be added to provide flexibility. The DSP's ability to handle new features or emerging algorithms in software is vital, since digital-TV applications are expected to evolve gradually.

As nonstandard applications come up, Dengel amplified, "media processors such as the TriMedia can help free up the computing power of the CPU, making the platform both more flexible and scalable."

The pSOS and Windows CE operating systems and a MIPS bus were also chosen for the DTV platform.

Meanwhile, Philips Semiconductors is using an ARM CPU for its GSM, TDMA and CDMA cell phones and cordless telephony. R.E.A.L, the company's proprietary DSP core, will also be part of the telecom platform, as will an ARM bus. The OS expected to run on the platform is "to be fixed," Claasen said. A new OS, such as Epoch, could be among the candidates, "but different OSes are still emerging, and we haven't selected one," he noted.

Claasen noted that the company's so-called CoReUse approach to hardware intellectual property consists of a design methodology, a library of reusable blocks and an IC design flow. The company is also pursuing reusable software modules within a specific application, which it calls MoReUse.

The transition, already well under way for the digital-video platform but yet to be sorted out for others, is much easier to talk about than to implement. Dengel observed that the toughest part of the transition to the digital-video platform strategy so far is not so much the technology itself, "but introducing the changes to the management process or mind-set of our own people." Though they have already stepped into the digital domain, he said, "many engineers and engineering managers in the community are still thinking within the parameters of analog design and analog-product life cycles."

Diversity as impediment

Citing Philips Semiconductors' consumer-systems multisite operations as an example, Dengel noted that the company has "discovered a diversity of design methodologies implemented at different sites."

That diversity includes differences not only in tools and languages-such as Verilog vs. VHDL-but also in the use of top-down vs. bottom-up design methodologies and in varying preferences as to when and how design verification is performed. Such differences didn't matter much when each site minded its own business in developing its specialty products. But now that some of each group's cores need to be reused or combined with other cores developed by other sites, the differences in design approach must be resolved.

To complicate the issue, some of the sites were developing technologies that seriously overlapped work done elsewhere. The Nijmegen site, for example, has been working on ICs for TV and audio applications; Philips' Hamburg operation has similarly been developing ICs for TV, audio and monitor products. The company's Caen operation has been pursuing RF and set-top box technologies; the Southampton team has been working on digital video technologies and CD-X. The Taipei site has been working on microcontrollers.

If Philips Semiconductors' customers were interested in the development of a DVD/set-top combo product, for example, closer design collaboration among the Caen, Southampton and Nijmegen sites would be crucial.

"We'd first have to make sure each block from the different sites could be simulated," said Dengel. "Further, we'd need to be able to carry out the total system integration under one roof, by using a [common] methodology, design flow and library of reusable blocks."