Jeff Bier’s Impulse Response—Reinventing the Wheel

Submitted by Jeff Bier on Mon, 04/08/2002 - 16:00

In the early days of the automotive industry, every car was a unique, handcrafted specimen—even mundane items like pistons were one-of-a-kind. This changed in 1908, when Cadillac disassembled three Model K's, mixed the parts together, and then built three running cars from the hodgepodge of parts. Today, this feat seems wholly unremarkable—even cars as seemingly dissimilar as Fords and Jaguars often share major components. One of the great lessons of the 20th-century automotive industry is that differences between vehicles should exist only where they add value.

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 efforts are 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 pre-existing 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 production-grade software templates that provide the basic nuts and bolts needed to integrate product-specific code with third-party algorithms, hardware drivers, etc. These products promise to shift development efforts from critical but non- differentiating components like TCP/IP stacks to value-added features like a slick user interfaces.

Perhaps the most important benefit of this "pre-packaged" 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 extremely attractive. As DSP features are merged into an ever-growing range of embedded applications, this scenario is likely to become common, and processor vendors who can provide the right mix of hardware, software, and development support stand to gain an upper hand.

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