*fighting off urge to reference Corben Dallas / LeeLoo*
The last paragraph is quite telling - when they say "niche application", they mean "killer application".
Circuit designers are quite a bit divorced from the actual circuit etch. They are also under an enormous amount of pressure to get designs that are reliable and into production with low failure rates - their customers, being consumer electronics companies, can and will drop them if something with similar capabilities and higher reliability exists - See Apple, with the iPod -- sometimes even the same model has a different chip for a given function, and the "classic" Shuffle form-factor died off because a system-on-a-chip was developed that did most everything that it took two PCB's on the classic to perform.
The new Shuffle - and indeed the iPod touch, which uses the same MP3/Audio codec logic - is highly intolerant of malformed MP3's - it merely aborts playback. Apple doesn't care - they can point at the MP3 as being at fault. The Classic shuffle would just keep playing back malformed MP3/audio until it ran out of working RAM, and then hang, and customers said "pants to this".
The company who had the contract to make the audio processor/core logic for the classic shuffle practically went bankrupt overnight when Apple announced they were using another supplier for the new Shuffles.
So, plenty of pressure there not to innovate.
The people who make the tools that transition a design from a C# or C++ source to a physical layout model to a series of etch masks and deposition processes - they're going to have to build those tools in order to produce reliability. That'll take three years, either for the tools to be built or for the people who develop the process at HP/IBM to leave and form their own companies, and apply their expertise to the tools, or for HP to spin off a tool company.
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(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 02:49 pm (UTC)That is very fundamentally interesting. Downloaded the paper to read. I think we all might have something new to learn...
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 11:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 03:10 pm (UTC)The last paragraph is quite telling - when they say "niche application", they mean "killer application".
Circuit designers are quite a bit divorced from the actual circuit etch. They are also under an enormous amount of pressure to get designs that are reliable and into production with low failure rates - their customers, being consumer electronics companies, can and will drop them if something with similar capabilities and higher reliability exists - See Apple, with the iPod -- sometimes even the same model has a different chip for a given function, and the "classic" Shuffle form-factor died off because a system-on-a-chip was developed that did most everything that it took two PCB's on the classic to perform.
The new Shuffle - and indeed the iPod touch, which uses the same MP3/Audio codec logic - is highly intolerant of malformed MP3's - it merely aborts playback. Apple doesn't care - they can point at the MP3 as being at fault. The Classic shuffle would just keep playing back malformed MP3/audio until it ran out of working RAM, and then hang, and customers said "pants to this".
The company who had the contract to make the audio processor/core logic for the classic shuffle practically went bankrupt overnight when Apple announced they were using another supplier for the new Shuffles.
So, plenty of pressure there not to innovate.
The people who make the tools that transition a design from a C# or C++ source to a physical layout model to a series of etch masks and deposition processes - they're going to have to build those tools in order to produce reliability. That'll take three years, either for the tools to be built or for the people who develop the process at HP/IBM to leave and form their own companies, and apply their expertise to the tools, or for HP to spin off a tool company.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 09:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-05-01 09:12 pm (UTC)