Consumer Electronics Forum

Industry experts discuss new developments, continued trends, and the future of portable devices for consumer electronics

CONVENED AND MODERATED BY CHRISTINA NICKOLAS

As 2012 unfolds, we are already seeing a splash of new technologies related to consumer electronics, such as haptic features on smartphones. We also continue to see the continuation of the trend of portable products with integrated batteries and the need for new approaches to lower power consumption. In this forum, we also investigate the challenges designers and manufacturers face.

Electronic Products: Within the next twelve months, what major developments do you see in consumer electronics?

ShreHarsha Rao (Product Line Manager for Haptics or Tactile Feedback Technology within Texas Instruments Analog): So the question you asked me is very relevant for what we are doing here in TI. So for people who don’t know what haptics is, it’s basically a touchscreen tactile feedback technology that is actually gaining a lot of momentum in the smartphone and tablet market today. So in its very basic form, when your cell phone vibrates, that’s the basic form of haptics. It’s the tactile feedback that is getting the user’s attention.

But where we expect and we are seeing this technology take off is to improve and enhance the user experience for gaming on mobile devices. Today, people are using their iPhones — or their Androids or tablets for that matter — for gaming. And the touchscreen technologies of today are great. But one thing that it critically lacks is the feedback. It never touches back or it never talks back to you. And that’s the technology that we are developing, and that’s the technology that we’re going to see in smartphones that are already shipping today and that are in smartphones and tablets in the next few months.

So for example let’s say you are playing Angry Birds, which is a very popular game. Imagine if you can actually feel the vibration strength when you pull the string, and when you hit the bricks, you can feel the vibration strength. And then let’s say you’re playing a racing game. And then when your car hits the bump, you can actually feel it on your handheld device versus nothing.

So its the critical piece of user experience of tactile feedback that is missing in today’s mobile devices. TI’s Haptics technology is bringing it back. And, I can publicly state that we’ve had a few mobile devices — like HTC, the Nokia cell phones and some of the Android tablets like Toshiba —which already include TI Haptics technologies. But what I cannot state is obviously a lot of products that are in the pipeline. But we expect a slew of these tactile feedbacks/haptics-based mobile phones and tablets to hit the market in the next few months. And we are pretty excited about that.

Electronic Products: I actually had a chance to feel that by playing a guitar app on a smartphone with the chords. And it was really fantastic experience, just like I was really playing guitar, you know, you feel all the chords.

Mike Salas (General Manager of Microcontroller Products at Silicon Labs): Being an MCU supplier, we actually have a large depth and breadth of customers that we deal with especially in the consumer electronics space. And what’s clear to us is that innovation really does continue to occur at the individual product level. Companies continue to find ways to build more appealing solutions for consumers — in everything from thermostats and washing machines to wireless headsets and watches. We’ve seen them all. But clearly, the push is on to IP-enable the entire consumer electronics industry in an aesthetically pleasing way. Put another way, complexity is out, and elegance and 24/7 convenience are in.

So I think the challenge for companies today is to find ways to successfully tie together what I think are three independent disciplines in a completely synergistic way — these being software developers, hardware designers, and mechanical engineers. And what’s fascinating to me is that as a supplier in the microcontroller business, we have technologies and tools to help bring these three disciplines together in ways not possible in years past. As a result, many fascinating things are occurring in the consumer space right now.

Rory Pynenburg (Director of Technology at Micro Power Electronics, manufacturer of mission-critical batteries, chargers, and power supplies): I would echo Mike’s sentiments that this is going to require more of a systems approach to products moving forward. One thing that I see is the continuation of the trend of portable products with integrated batteries.

The classic examples of this are the tablet and the MP3 player. In those cases, the batteries need to power the host device for the duration of its life. From a power perspective, the main goals are improvements in energy density, which relates to the runtime, form factors, reliability, better cycle life, recharge rate, and — obviously — safety. The problem is to get all of these elements to work together.

Upal Sengupta (Marketing Manager for Portable Power at Texas Instruments): So I could continue that thought saying that basically there’s just a much wider proliferation of devices in everybody’s household. You have a smartphone, a tablet, notebook, PC, and connected TV that is Internet-enabled, DVRs, and more. So there’s just a much broader proliferation of electronic devices in everybody’s household. And they’re all going to be connected. They’re all going to somehow communicate with each other. You can share files. And you use them all in multiple modes. You have a smartphone that you use both for business and for entertainment and playing games, watching movies, whatever.

You’ll find that people are using their equipment a lot. And so that does speak to battery life that they’re going to put more demands on the battery life. The other side of that is they’re going to be recharging very frequently, on a daily basis or sometimes even more, right? And so you want that battery use and recharge profile to be as seamless as possible. So that gives us opportunities for things like wireless charging, higher-rate chargers, so that you can frequently top off your battery with a minimum impact on downtime for the user.

Vijendra Kuroodi (Principal Systems Architect at ROHM Semiconductor):

Yes, I would like to echo on that. I interact with systems architects in companies, mostly in the consumer electronics and the PC industries and we discuss product requirements and specifications. I very often hear the need for new approaches to lower power consumption. Just as Upal was saying, tablets and portable computing and communications devices will continue to be very important, and customers are looking for new ways to reduce power consumption.

So that brings us to this point; Lapis Semiconductor, which is a member of the ROHM group of companies, has announced the ML610Q792 Sensor Hub, which is targeted at the smartphone market. The Sensor Hub helps reduce power consumption in certain frequently used smartphone applications. What has happened in the tablet, ultrabook, or smartphone platforms is that there are so many sensors, that they are best managed locally by a dedicated sensor hub.

The Lapis Sensor Hub is based on a low-power 8-bit microcontroller core and includes a 16-bit coprocessor for additional on-demand processing power. When the phone runs a pedometer application, for example, the low-power Sensor Hub handles computation locally, which reduces power consumption by avoiding the need to frequently wake up a powerful quad-core system processor which may not be running optimal software.

Ted Worroll (Global Product Manager, ITT): And obviously if you’re familiar with ITT and ICS division, we manufacture the interconnect systems that go anywhere from military to consumer electronics.

But getting back to that power question and wireless charging, here in the United States, we have a wireless charging system that provides power to 5-W handheld devices. It uses magnetic resonance to wirelessly charge low-wattage-type systems for those military handheld devices and/or smartphones.

In our Shenzhen factory in China, we have a 3.3-kW wireless charging system. If you’re thinking about 3.3 kW, it’s a lot of power. And why would somebody need that? Well that’s actually the charging number for wireless charging of electric vehicles today. And it separates two plates basically 18 inches apart. And it’s close to 95% efficient in terms of transferring energy.

We also manufacture interconnects that are used in consumer devices, and we talk about lithium-ion technology and batteries. We’re very familiar with the capabilities of electric vehicles, as well as what you would find in handheld portable devices, whether it’s medical or just consumer needs. We also manufacture interconnects for microphone speakers, vibrators, antenna pickup, so on and so forth.

And what we see in the industry is a huge move away from beryllium copper. We spend a lot of time with material-science-type technologies in finding that correct product, that correct alloy that will replace beryllium. Many people want to move away from beryllium as it’s hazardous material.

But long story short, we’ve moved a lot of our contacts, interconnect systems to titanium copper today. And we have 4 billion of these interconnects out in the field with no failures.

So we see small size, material size in terms of alloys and low-contact resistance and basically spring-loaded-type features to do the interconnects as well as components in antennas. And that includes battery contacts and battery device as well.

Electronic Products: Anyone wants to add anything?

Upal Sengupta: Just to kind of sum up, I think a lot of the things we’ve heard – and I think Rory probably mentioned that these products are going to have embedded batteries. And prior to that, we talked about the combination of the disciplines, the mechanical design and electronic design. You see one thing I think that’s interesting to think about is that you’re putting – you know, as consumer electronics develop, you look at a tablet today, and it has the capability of what was the desktop not that long ago, right?

But there’s no fan and it’s pretty smaller. So that speaks to the mechanical design aspect. So I think the packaging of the electronic components is a big deal. And even more than that, the efficiency of the electronics in power conversion is a big deal.

So we’re working really hard to maintain high efficiency. And it’s – you know, I think, you know, the gentleman from ROHM mentioned, you know, they’re looking at 95% efficiency in their high-power system. We’re looking at those same kind of efficiencies even in low-power systems where a few percent loss in a low-power system is a big deal now. So there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on maintaining the maximum power conversion efficiency.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Customers are looking for higher and higher efficiencies. Rohm Semiconductor has a strong presence in switching converters & power management devices. We have also recently released very high-efficiency, low-power DC-DC converters that offer peak efficiencies that exceed 95%. So those are available from ROHM as well.

Upal Sengupta: So I think efficiency all around is going to be a much bigger deal to maintain.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Absolutely. Yes.

Challenges designers face

Electronic Products: What are the issues that designers face while consumer devices not only need to be connected to the Internet, but also need to be fully featured and connected to one another?

Rory Pynenburg: If I can just jump back in again with some of the battery requirement issues here, as they’re becoming more fully functioned and consumers are using these devices in diverse environments and demanding longer runtimes, there’s a drive for cell vendors and battery manufacturers to improve the energy density of the storage system.

One of the easiest ways that this can be achieved — and I’ve seen it on numerous cell vendor roadmaps —is to increase the voltage and use materials that have higher-charge voltages. This is a great way forward, however, the problem with this approach is that for products with well-established bases in the market, there may be issues with peripherals such as charges that will need to be field upgraded. At Micro Power, we’re investing a lot of effort in developing system-level solutions capable of supporting any foreseeable changes in the battery technology. In this approach, our customers avoid having to bring products back into a central location for updates.

ShreHarsha Rao: So I can agree with the comment that was made earlier. All the gentlemen on the call clearly expressed concerns about the power rate. So what we are seeing obviously is with every new generation of a mobile phone and a tablet release, you can expect brighter displays, 4G LTE, modems, and all that kind of stuff.

The bottom line is still that consumers expect better battery life. I mean there was a big issue when the iPhone 4S was released and its battery life was slightly down compared to the previous one and consumers complained about it.

TI and several other companies are working to reduce the power consumption in a mobile device. If you look at a power profile of a mobile phone battery, it’s dominated by the applications processors and the display. It is extremely important that the apps processor needs to be turned on only when absolutely needed in order to save power. All the analog sensor components around it need to reduce the interaction with the apps processor in order to save power.

And I think one of the gentlemen from ROHM mentioned about the sensor hub, I think that’s actually a fantastic concept. And obviously it’s something that TI is working on and we’re taking it to the next level, which is to actually have it integrated in chipsets. But most importantly is how are these various sensors on a mobile phone, at a tablet, working in tandem, in synchronization without bothering the host. Because the less you bother the host, the less you wake up the host, the more power you’re going to save.

So that’s where we are dedicated towards, coming up with this intelligent “analog companion chips” around these power-hungry chipsets that can seamlessly work and it kind of gathers data from the sensors on the phone and make intelligent things happen.

You know, for example, when you tilt your iPhone or an Android phone, the gyro or the accelerometer sends a signal to the chipset saying all right, you’re going to move your screen the other way. What if you can do that intelligently without the host interaction? You’re going to save a lot of power there.

So those are some of the things that I think more and more people are going to start investing in and looking into the next few months because battery power cannot go down even if you start adding features to these phones.

Mike Salas: Let’s tie some of these themes together. What we are all talking about is the ability to capture information, the ability to compute that information, and then the ability to communicate that information.

Fundamentally, the function of capturing information is the process of interacting with the real world. This includes technologies such as environmental sensors, human interfaces, and the ability to effectively move information from an analog world into a digital one.

Computing clearly is the process of then taking this captured information and making decisions about what you want to do with this information. And this is clearly driven by the end product or application itself. This is where processing or microcontroller horsepower comes to the table.

The last thing is this ability to communicate. If you capture information and have computed it, you also need to communicate it. Traditionally, this has been primarily a wired function, using things like UARTs, USB interfaces, or Ethernet interfaces to send the processed information somewhere.

Of course, more recently, we’ve really seen the emergence of wireless connectivity, which can be enabled by devices like wireless MCUs. However, in either the wired or wireless world, the real emerging issue is how to enable these devices to operate in this new IP-enabled, iPhone-driven world.

For the foreseeable future, what I think you’ll see is a bifurcated model where you’ll have proprietary point-to-point or point-to-multipoint solutions that will be used alongside more standardized approaches, whether they be ZigBee or Wi-Fi or 6LoWPAN. Every wireless approach has its pros and cons.

However, utilizing many of the technologies from these companies on the roundtable today can really help make these disparate approaches appear more seamless to the consumer. And I think, fundamentally, that’s going to be our job — to determine how we can address these challenges and then develop a more seamless presentation to answer the end consumer’s needs.

Vijendra Kuroodi: I just wanted to mention that with all the innovations we are seeing in the consumer electronics space, ROHM has invested a lot in sensor technologies and human interface processing. We have invested in technologies that make it easier for a human to interact with a device using various kinds of sensors.

For example, ROHM has acquired Kionix, which is one of the top suppliers of MEMS sensors for smartphones and tablets. Another example is the display or the touch interface. ROHM has the expertise in multiple products that go with the display and touch interface — touch sensors, timing controllers, LCD drivers, optical sensors, motion sensors, analog and mixed-signal technology, the whole thing; we have invested in the entire chain of technologies that help a device interact with a human. We also try to bring those together and provide a solution.

Electronic Products: Are they new markets? Any opportunities that could be created? Anything going away?

Upal Sengupta: We hope not. I think to that point of that we’ve all been talking about, there’re so many more kinds of products. So in general, yes, of course some things will become less popular. You know, a case in point is the netbook PC. That was kind of a hot topic three years ago, but it was essentially been completely overrun by the tablet today, right?

But as things go away, there will be one or more things that probably replace them, right? And I think we see there are all kinds of connected gadgets that we’ve all been talking about. There’re just many more things that people use now, many more products with a battery, many more connected devices in everybody’s household, as well as being built into people’s vehicles, right?

So I think that you’re just going to see more and more different applications. As the basic technology has been developed over the past few years, that’s now being fanned out into so many more applications, right? And obviously, I think one of the things that you saw at the Consumer Electronics Show a couple of months ago, was a lot of emphasis on ultrabooks. And so you saw more ultrabook PCs or lighter-weight, higher-performance products coming out, that will fill that gap between the tablet and the higher computing needs that people still have.

ShreHarsha Rao: What you’re seeing is that gesture-based computing to be a new market in the whole consumer electronic devices. I mean, Siri has been super popular now. It’s a way to communicate with your handheld using voice. I think now, is there a touch-less gesturing that you can do, very Microsoft Kinect-like that you can interact with your handheld devices or even tablets for that matter.

So we think that is what in TI we call as Natural User Interface or NUI. It kind of blends in very well with our applications processor strategy, which is OMAP, and also our 3D imaging in a lot of sensors that are required to make this work. So TI has a breadth in both the processing world from an applications processor and also the sensors from analog world to make this, what we believe is a natural extension of the way you interact with handheld devices.

You know, a lot of these gestures are very intuitive for humans, just like touch is so intuitive. As example my 2-year-old daughter now unlocks an iPhone and plays YouTube videos. It’s so intuitive. And you can take it to the next level by adding gestures. And I think that’s only going to grow. And I think this is probably a new market which brings in a lot of silicon content from the embedded sensor side and also a lot of processing on the applications processor side.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Yes, I can’t agree more with ShreHarsha. This is obviously true. We are seeing a lot of interest in gesture recognition. And we have a very interesting product based on IR sensing that can recognize gestures where you can swipe your arm, left to right or up and down, and have these gestures recognized.

I believe that we will see a lot of innovations in the TV market. Obviously, TVs are becoming smarter and more connected. The display technologies are improving and we will see new uses for a TV. We will see improved gesture recognition for games. So whether it is added intelligence in a remote control or new applications for a connected TV, there’ll be a lot of innovation there.

Mike Salas: I’m going to echo a lot of the statements already made today. But there’s one thing I think is important for all of us to keep in mind. This is my litmus test. We all live in this very technical world. We design very complex things. The march towards innovation is very compelling. But ultimately, it does come down to the consumer.

And the litmus test for me is when I call my wife, my kids or my friends, I interact with them in a non-technical way. What do they see and find appealing in consumer technology at the end of the day? And what I found — and this is just my general observation — is the need for simplicity. It’s taking a thermostat, for example, that may have all these different buttons and different screen options and is very hard to program, and then re-engineering it with a very simple intuitive human interface. That’s what is very appealing to a consumer.

The IP enablement piece is very important. Clearly, as consumers have become more and more familiar and comfortable with iPhone technology and IP-enabled technology, the ability to now use smart phone applications to drive other tasks is clearly becoming important.

If you look under the hood, there are a lot of things that we can do to try to make the user experience simpler. For example, when bridging technologies, if you’re going to IP-enable something, there are a lot of technologies that you have to worry about. You have to figure out, is it going to be a ZigBee or Wi-Fi solution, or are you going to transmit over an Ethernet or USB connection. There’s a way that we can make that simpler. You can offer, for example, a microcontroller solution with the ability to bridge between a proprietary solution into a more standardized solution, such as a bridge between the wired and wireless worlds.

My perspective is that this is the way it’s going to be for the next 12 to 24 months at a minimum as we try to find ways to bridge between the complexities and to really hide these complexities from the end consumer. At the end of the day, we just need to make technology very simple for them. And I think that’s really what consumers are looking for.

Rory Pynenburg: I couldn’t agree more. It’s our obligation as designers to increase simplicity. But at the same time, improve the ruggedness of devices, and in doing so, the reliability.

One of the pieces that Micro Power is working on to improve this ruggedness is contact-less charging. The main challenge with it, though, as was mentioned previously, is its 95% efficiency. That 5% loss of energy is going somewhere, usually as heat within the host device. Many ultraportable devices don't have provision for active cooling, so the ability to remove heat from the product will have to rely on smart, holistic system-level design.

Electronic Products: Does anybody else want anything to add?

Upal Sengupta: I think just a minor comment related to what Rory was just saying – as you said, the holistic approach. We’re even seeing, where in the past, the battery pack was considered a single thing. We’re seeing customers that are making tablets that have two- or three-cell pack. They’re actually spreading the cells onto different parts of the enclosure, right, just to make use of the space and keep things thin and flat. And that of course presents thermal challenges as well.

I think, Rory, maybe you’ve seen some of that before?

Rory Pynenburg: We have, yes. As the processors get more powerful we're once again challenged with dissipating heat.

Upal Sengupta: Right. So this even feeds back into sensor technology or at least temperature sensing that, you know, now you have to sense temperature in multiple locations because you don’t have a uniformly distribution anymore.

Mike Salas: Getting back to Rory’s point about the ruggedness of electronics products, that’s another great example of what consumers want and expect. If they drop their consumer electronics device, whatever it may be, they don’t want it to break.

We recently did consumer application studies and have worked with companies that have looked at this problem and said, okay, I want to make a solution that’s not only simple, but I don’t want it to break. And what they found, for example, is that the thing that is most likely to break in many of these consumer electronics applications is the crystal oscillator.

So if you look at that crystal and the technology that’s embedded in the crystal, it’s a type of electromechanical component that has a tendency to break. So from our perspective, solving a relatively simple problem like that can offer a real tangible benefit to a consumer. In this particular example we implemented a sophisticated phase-locked loop architecture in a microcontroller device that allows us to internally generate the clocks necessary to operate the device without the need for an external crystal.

And that again is one example of a very technical thing that we have done to improve product reliability. But the end benefit to a consumer is this ruggedness and simplicity and the fact that this product doesn’t break as easily. Sometimes the greatest innovations are those that address a complex technical challenge and yet provide a real tangible benefit to a consumer.

Electronic Products: So not only do designers have to face this type of challenges, but how about keeping production and design cost low, isn’t that something that you’re concerned of?

Upal Sengupta: I think the one basic approach we take at TI is in terms of cost reduction is higher levels of integration, so where we try to put as many functions into one IC as possible to reduce the total system cost. I think that’s pretty much across the board.

Electronic Products: Yes, okay.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Talking about cost reduction, Rohm Semiconductor was the first in the world to announce a 4-wire resistive multi-touch controller IC at Sensors Expo last year. In all these tablets and mobile phones, one of the major cost drivers is the capacitive touchscreen. Capacitive touch is great, but it is expensive. Use of capacitive touch has skyrocketed since they are easy to interact with and it provides multi-touch a feature which was not possible to achieve using cheaper resistive touch technology until very recently.

Rohm has announced a series of ICs, actually quite a few of them, four or five different devices which support multi-touch using standard low cost 4-wire resistive touchscreens. So that really brings down the cost. For lower-cost consumer devices, that’s an option to consider.

Electronic Products: How do regulatory requirements affect the design process? And are there ways to bring products into the market faster?

Rory Pynenburg: Lithium ion batteries have been receiving some adverse press in the last five or so years.

But the things to bear in mind here, many of these issues have been related to after-market battery packs. We’ve seen that a number of influential lobby groups requesting increased limitations in the transportation of lithium-ion batteries.

Where we really need to focus our efforts is controlling the ecosystem so that after-market and counterfeit batteries don’t sully the market. Companies such as TI have made fantastic inroads into secure authentication for batteries, however this does need to be coupled with best manufacturing processes in order to ensure the safest possible battery solutions.

ShreHarsha Rao: There’s one thing that – I mean I think it’s a very good question really. And one particular thing that springs to my mind that may not apply to others on the phone here is the safety standards. The high-voltage safety standards for mobile devices is often very less understood among our customers and their quality experts.

There are some very cool technologies that obviously I cannot state publicly that need some high-voltage requirements on a mobile device. And then these are absolutely safe and will change the way consumers interact with mobile devices. But unfortunately, there are some very strict UL/CE safety requirements for mobile devices which have not been revised. So that basically makes our customers kind of completely unwilling to even move further. And, you know, the consumers are missing out on some very cool technologies that are high voltage at this point of time. And it’s very hard for them to get into mobile devices.

So I think the regulatory requirements on the safety, on high-voltage stuff needs to be seriously revisited because it affects a lot of cool technologies getting into handhelds.

Vijendra Kuroodi: ShreHarsha, are you talking about isolation?

ShreHarsha Rao: I’m talking about some high-voltage technologies for ultrasonic proximity, some high-voltage technologies for some very next-generation user experience. So this is something that we have started to see a lot in the market today. But the UL requirements for safety mandates and anything beyond 60 volts on a cell phone or a tablet for that matter go through this very stringent safety.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Right.

ShreHarsha Rao: And it’s very less understood. It’s not a safety concern for customers. It’s just the way it’s written in the safety document and turns customers away.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Okay.

Mike Salas: Another area where regulatory concerns come into play is in the wireless world. Clearly, a lot of the regulations are already defined at the RF level for cell phones. But, if you go beyond that and start trying to communicate via Wi-Fi or ZigBee or even proprietary methods, there are many other regulatory issues.

And, unfortunately, it differs from country to country. The wireless requirements here in the U.S. are going to be very different than those in China and those in Europe. Given all the different frequencies, there are varying standards that each country requires.

So the challenge for a company like Silicon Labs, or anybody else for that matter, is to create wireless solutions that can be adapted to any one of these different areas. To offer frequency flexibility, for example, to support a 915 MHz requirement in the U.S. or an 868 MHz requirement in Europe while still offering excellent range and low power.

Clearly there are a lot of regulatory issues that come into play as you work through and try to design some of these solutions because at the end of the day, the OEMs themselves are going to have to address these issues. So the better we can try to adapt ourselves to work in that dynamic environment, the easier it is for our potential customers and OEMs to develop solutions

Electronic Products: So what are the issues that you face when collaborating with these customers? What are they saying?

Mike Salas: They want help. It’s interesting because it’s actually a set of problems, and it’s not easy. We’ve already talked about power. Low power is critical. They want to go into an environment where they can reduce the number of batteries because there’s a battery tax in Europe, for example. So that adds cost. Power reduction is one way to reduce cost.

Customers come to us, and they say we know you can offer solutions that reduce power. Well, what about wireless solutions? Can you offer a way to create a single wireless transceiver that can be dynamically programmed to operate in different frequencies? Well, yes, we can do that as well. Well, what about antenna-matching? What about taking the actual frequency that you’re going to operate your wireless transceiver in and actually provide the appropriate level of antenna-matching so I can actually get some range and performance out of that?

This involves really getting into the electromechanical aspects of the design. And this gets back to the first point I brought up at the very beginning of this conversation, which is at the end of the day, what we’re really trying to do is find ways to bring together the software developer, the hardware designer and the mechanical engineer because all three play integral parts in the creation of a compelling consumer electronics equipment design.

And each one of these has to be addressed in different ways. And I think that really is the challenge for us, and probably for many of us on this roundtable call. How can you provide not just a chip-level solution? How can we adapt ourselves to work in the hardware environment, and how can we allow a software developer to work in a tightly integrated way with the hardware, and how can we make the mechanical engineer’s job easier by enabling small form-factor or low-power designs to increase flexibility. Again there are a lot of things that we can do in this area, and I think that’s really the challenge for all of us on the phone today.

Upal Sengupta: Right. I’d absolutely agree that, you know, the first thing you said just now was the customers are asking for help, right? I think that’s how we started that section, right? And that’s universally true. And, you know, one of the things that I’m seeing, certainly, as the years go on, we actually see – you know, some years ago, we used to get more of the not-invented-here kind of concept, right? The customers had their own design staffs that wanted to basically develop their own customized solutions exactly for their needs. Okay, that still exists to some extent. But more and more, they want their suppliers, the IC vendors, to give them as close to complete solution as possible or at least a solid reference design that they can build on.

They have less time to do engineering. I think some few minutes ago, we talked about reduced cycle times or, you know, pressures to get things done quicker. And that’s how they want to do that, right? They want to start out with this – a reference design that’s closer to a complete solution so that they’re not starting from a blank sheet of paper when they’re doing product development. I think most of the guys would probably agree that they’ve heard some of that.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Yes. I agree with you totally. Yes, a Systems approach is what I think wins in the end. So if you can somehow bring all these things together, that helps a lot. For example, new display and touch technologies are coming together. We’re all seeing that. And if you could combine LCD driver, timing controller, touch controller and other sensor technologies, we could reduce noise pick up and add value.

Mike Salas: Yes. And I have a great example. A week ago, I was visiting a lighting customer that has a great history in building these lighting fixtures. Now a question came up in the meeting where they expressed a new need to iPhone-enable their lights. And they came to us and said, “We need your help because we’re mechanical designers. We know how to build a lighting solution, and how to make an attractive fixture and tie this thing into a socket. We have absolutely zero idea how to take this design and create not only a wireless connection to this IP-enabled world, but also to create an iPhone application that can help drive that.”

So they were literally asking us to help them create a solution that can provide the wireless connectivity, the IP connection, as well as the application-driven model. Many companies are looking for that style of help today. And I think that is the reality that we’re all going through.

Upal Sengupta: I would absolutely agree with that. That’s one area that our teams have we added staff, a big area for us is our reference design team, right? So they don’t design ICs. They don’t sell ICs, right? They basically design boards for customers that have complete solutions using components from multiple suppliers essentially so that our end customer has a drop-end solution.

And as you just said, we have customers getting into areas that they didn’t know about before, right? We have customers designing battery operated products that don’t know anything about batteries. We have customers developing lighting equipment that are, you know, as we said, primarily mechanical engineers. They don’t necessarily know how an LED works or how an LED driver works, you know. So I think the burden is being pushed down onto the supplier base a lot more to essentially give the customer almost a turnkey solution.

ShreHarsha Rao: This is a very interesting observation, guys.

I cannot help but wonder, at least in the mobile space and the tablet space, that hardware is becoming a commodity, you know. I mean, you look at any other Android phone; if I just remove the label there, they all look alike to me, right? So that kind of scares me as a semiconductor vendor. Because the innovation and the differentiation right now has moved up a notch to the software ecosystem, the app developers, the user experience in software. So I think, you know, I know that we can provide some differentiated solutions on the silicon side. But end of the day, I’m starting to get a feeling that the whole hardware has become a commodity, right?

So I think in the processing world and the microcontroller world, that’s less true. But I think in the mobile world, it’s becoming much more of a reality where in, you know, I think software, be it Android or IOS or Windows, is becoming a key differentiating factor for end customers, right? I mean the hardware has become really, really abstracted to them.

I mean, I don’t know how people on the phone think about this. But it’s something that all the semiconductor vendors need to start thinking about, you know, making their “presence” felt up in the software level.

Vijendra Kuroodi: Right. We try hard to provide drivers and we offer support for multiple operating systems. This is a common customer requirement. The software is where customers need more help.

Mike Salas: I agree. There actually is a partitioning here almost at the handset level. In the embedded world, that’s perhaps a little bit different. And I think there actually is still some innovation that can occur at a hardware level. But importantly, it’s the meshing of the hardware and the software together that’s really important here. Clearly from a software perspective, we can provide a free, easy-to-use development tool chain that’s very tightly integrated with the microcontroller that can make the developer’s job easier. The tools help them configure the MCU device and provide diagnostic capabilities.

But interestingly, at a hardware level, by thinking of it more abstractly, how can we then take hardware innovation and then provide that literally as a benefit to a system designer or a mechanical engineer?

Here’s a simple example. Silicon Labs’ microcontrollers offer an innovative crossbar architecture that allows both the analog and digital peripherals on the device, such as an ADC or UART, to be dynamically placed on virtually any pin of the MCU. Now if you’re a mechanical engineer trying to place peripherals in a very precise way because you have form factor limitations and power limitations, this level of flexibility can be a lifesaver. Having this dramatically flexible architecture can allow a mechanical engineer to place the pins just right and allow the software developer to code and to do their programming and application coding in a very seamless way.

Even today after 30 years of evolution in microcontrollers, there’s still a lot of innovation. I do agree with the other statement that handsets are becoming more and more commoditized at a hardware level and so software really is where it’s at.

Consumer Electronics