Printer designers challenged to add high-value features to cost-sensitive apps
By Neil Epstein, Zoran Corporation
Product development in consumer electronics markets is increasingly characterized by intense pressures to both reduce costs and add value-rich features.This is certainly true in the market for consumer inkjet printers. Currently exceeding $11 billion in annual hardware sales, inkjet printer manufacturers continually push to add new features that offer high-value to consumers, rather than choosing to compete solely on price.
Neil Epstein, Zoran Corporation
By Neil Epstein, Zoran Corporation
Product development in consumer electronics markets is increasingly characterized by intense pressures to both reduce costs and add value-rich features. This is certainly true in the market for consumer inkjet printers. Currently exceeding $11 billion in annual hardware sales, inkjet printer manufacturers continually push to add new features that offer high-value to consumers, rather than choosing to compete solely on price.
A key area in which inkjet printer makers are pushing to make their products more useful to consumers, and also to get consumers to use more inkjet and paper, is direct printing from devices other than PCs. Manufacturers are looking to boost the value of inkjet printers for consumers by adding advanced photo editing and printing features such as photo enhancement, editing and management, using interactive touch-screen displays with a large user-interface panel that incorporates more function buttons, as well.
Concurrently, there’s intensifying pressure among printer OEMs not only to out-source manufacturing to low-cost contract electronic manufacturers (CEMs) in Taiwan and China, but also to out-source product design and development to Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). While this model has been employed for several years, there’s presently an influx of newcomers to the ODM arena that don’t have quite the experience of more traditional ODMs.
Market Shifts Pose Challenges
These sea-state changes in market trends and directions are combining to pose a major challenge for printer OEMs and their design and development food chains. However, one constant is that cost continues to be a paramount issue that must simultaneously be addressed in designing and developing inkjet printers for consumers.
High on the list of challenges facing inkjet printer vendors and their ODM partners are: how to put in a growing set of features and turn out an expanding lineup of models, while continuing to optimize both unit costs and development expenses; how to have a platform that works with a variety of inkjet print heads; and how to take advantage of the strong mechanical and electrical design capabilities of ODMs, while overcoming for their relative weaknesses in silicon and firmware design.
Meeting Design Challenges
Fortunately system designers have Moore’s law on their side. Moore’s law states that computing power roughly doubles every two years, at the same or lower cost. At the center of this persistent trend is ever shrinking silicon process geometries. As process geometries shrink the physical size of SOCs becomes increasingly driven by I/O pad requirements, and less by the number of transistors in the chip. This allows chip designers greater freedom to utilize programmable processor cores, instead of fixed-function logic.
The challenges of supporting a growing feature set and a variety of inkjet print heads are best met with an architecture that enables programmable image processing and mechanism control. Additionally, suppliers of silicon-based system-on-chip (SOC) solutions are able to aggressively integrate analog functionality to achieve lower unit costs.
The third challenge can be resolved with a three-way partnering between the brand name printer OEM, the ODM, and the SOC platform provider.
Recognizing the market’s shift towards PC-independent image capture devices that communicate directly with printers without involving a PC, Zoran Corp. several years ago began embedding the required processing capabilities, traditionally performed by the powerful CPU inside a PC, into low-cost printing devices. This effort yielded a new class of powerful, integrated, and flexible SOC solutions, the latest manifestation of which is the recently-introduced Quatro 4050 and 4060 processors.
Zoran utilizes the industry-leading ARM CPU core in the Quatro family because of its high performance, small footprint, dense code size, and highly regarded software development tool suite. The Quatro DSP core, a fourth-generation design developed by Zoran, delivers unmatched performance for image processing operations. The flexRISC microcontroller core, also developed by Zoran, provides an efficient way to control mechanisms such as scanners and printers. By pairing the ARM CPU core with the Quatro DSP core and the flexRISC microcontroller core, the architecture in the Quatro 4050 and 4060 processors provides manufacturers with a unique combination of high-performance processing and easy-to-use programmability.
Zoran’s Quatro processors support the inkjet segment and, in particular, the inkjet all-in-one (AIO) printer, copier, and scanner device that is the largest and fastest-growing segment of the inkjet market. In addition to addressing the new features noted above, the Quatro 4050 and 4060 processors enable wireless connectivity, including both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capability.
Firmware Programmability Addresses Advanced Feature Needs
Zoran’s firmware programmable architecture allows for the quick addition of new features and trends in the market, such as enhanced touch-up capabilities and the manipulation of photos for better printed copies.
This design methodology is based on the basic concept that an SOC should be a highly programmable platform for firmware, and should be built around one or more fully programmable processor cores. Optimal cost is achieved by using a combination of general-purpose processor cores and special-purpose processor cores targeted at specific application processing requirements. With this architecture, the SOC is regarded as a processing platform and the system firmware, not the SOC itself, is the primary focus for product development.
An alternative methodology could be to have an ASIC with hard-wired logic, a less-flexible approach that’s also not as cost-effective. Often, inkjet printer manufacturers have their own algorithms with which to drive a variety of printers in their respective product portfolios. What’s more, printers tend to be more differentiated than other peripherals, and inkjet printer manufacturers pack in a lot of features. The programmability aspect of Zoran’s Quatro processors enables only the desired advanced features to be accounted for in each customer’s implementation of the Quatro SOCs, while reducing overhead costs.
To address the paramount issue of cost in inkjet printers designed for consumers, Zoran aggressively integrated into the Quatro processors analog front-ends, real-time clocks for fax functions and printer head maintenance, as well as analog-to-digital (A-D) converters for motor and mechanism control, and a touch-screen interface.
Zoran is more aggressive in its analog integration than most large manufacturers of inkjet printers. It can do so because its Imaging Division leverages the expertise of other analog design groups in sister business units that develop DVDs and digital cameras, et al. The Quatro 4050 and 4060 processors, for example, incorporate a scanner analog front-end that shares a common design with the sensor analog front-end used in Zoran’s digital camera SOCs.
To further aid its integration of analog capability, Zoran works very closely with its foundries and other suppliers to do all of the physical design—layout, route and placement—for its SOCs. The benefits of such cooperation in developing the Quatro 4050 and 4060 processors, among others, are being passed on to its printer OEM and ODM customers. By contrast, many printer OEMs look internally to their ASIC processes and are heavily dependent on what their respective ASIC vendors offer them, which is often limited to more general-purpose integration. Check out zoran's web site for details on its product offerings at zoran.com.
Neil Epstein is senior director of product marketing for Zoran’s Imaging Division in Burlington, Mass. He is responsible for planning and marketing of Zoran’s Quatro line of printer SOC solutions and IPS line of printer software solutions. Neil has been with Zoran since 2003, when Zoran acquired Oak Technology, at which time Oak’s Imaging Group became Zoran’s Imaging Division. Previously, Mr. Epstein held product marketing and engineering management responsibilities at Harlequin and Phoenix Technologies. Neil has an MBA from Babson College, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Boston University, and a B.S. in applied mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University.
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