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"Makimoto's Wave" --- Repeated Cycles of Standardization and Customization
Dr. Makimoto, who has been involved in
the semiconductor business for over 40 years, has,
through his extensive experience, discovered a certain
rule or regularity in semiconductor trends. The main
feature of this regularity lies in its large-scale
repetitive cycles that resemble the motion of a clock
pendulum (figure
1). According to Dr. Makimoto, "When large numbers
of new technologies, such as devices, architectures,
and software, appear, the semiconductor industry as
a whole moves towards standardization. Then, aspects
appear that function to suppress this motion, this
large swinging of the pendulum. These are the need
for product differentiation and added value, and the
imbalance between supply and demand.
In the other direction, progress in design automation
and advances in technologies such as CAM and CAT occur
and the semiconductor industry then shifts to customization.
Dr. Makimoto's comments on this movement were as follows.
"When the whole semiconductor arena becomes oriented
towards customization, there then appear reverse trends
towards early market entry, cost reductions, and more
efficient operation. (See figure
2.) If the whole industry moves towards standardization,
then a push towards customization arises, and when
the industry has moved towards customization, a force
for standardization pushes back. As seen from a macro
viewpoint, the semiconductor industry can be said
to repeat alternate phases of standardization and
customization." Dr. Makimoto, who thus focused on
the periodicity of the semiconductor business, now
proceeded to summarize these trends going back as
far as the 1950s as the "Makimoto's Wave" model shown
in figure 3.
This concept, which was first published in the January
1991 edition of Electronics Weekly, is still referred
to around the world as an indicator that foretells
the future of the semiconductor business.
"Now that the manufacturing costs associated with
advances in technology have become so high, semiconductor
technology is moving mainly in the direction of standardization.
However, applications are moving in the direction
of customization. As shown in the "Makimoto's Wave"
figure, the semiconductor field has clearly entered
the age of field programmability."
The Importance
of Field Programmability Technology
There are now large changes occurring in product lifetimes
to match the changes and pace of the semiconductor
market. Dr. Makimoto described these as follows, based
on figure 4.
"Until recently, products have had a life cycle of
3 to 5 years, first passing through a startup period
after introduction to the market and then entering
a period of maturity. However, more recently, the
lifetime of digital consumer products has been gradually
becoming shorter. Furthermore, at the same time as
the startup period becoming shorter, these products
(and their manufacturing) are reaching their peak
much earlier. It is a salient feature of the current
period that although the height of the peak tends
to be much higher than for earlier products, products
now rapidly reach the end of their lifetime. Thus
we are in a period characterized by ever-shortening
product life cycles and a rapidly changing digital
consumer marketplace. Thus it can be said that the
introduction of field programmability technology is
required to respond to these trends."
Dr. Makimoto himself has led the industry up to now
in commercializing the flash memory embedded microcontroller,
and has played the role of pioneer in this field.
Currently, many semiconductor manufacturers include
programmable memories such as EEPROM or flash memory
in their LSIs to respond quickly to varied customer
needs.
Recently, the rapid rise in costs associated with
the use of finer design rules has become an issue
at semiconductor manufacturing plants. Similarly,
the cost of producing the first sample of a new chip,
the "first silicon", has been increasing every year.
On this issue, Dr. Makimoto noted that the cost for
the "first silicon" in the latest 90 nm process is
six times that of the earlier 0.35 um process. (See
figure 5.)
He then commented on the recent trends towards reduced
costs as follows.
"To handle these increasing costs, end users are not
creating high-cost custom LSIs for each application,
but rather are using field programmable gate arrays
(FPGA), which allow the LSI functions to be determined
after the chip is produced, much more frequently. Figure
6 shows how the FPGA is positioned relative to ASICs.
For example, in 2005 for applications that require under
3 million units, an integration level of under 300K
gates, and an operating frequency of under 300 MHz,
it will be more efficient to use an FPGA than an ASIC,
and the FPGA will prove to have more advantages overall.
We can see that the trends towards increased performance
and reduced costs in FPGAs are progressing surely from
the fact that the difference in cost between FPGA and
ASIC solutions continues increase every year. "
Nonvolatile Memory
and Reconfigurable Technologies
As the widespread adoption of logic LSIs
such as FPGAs progresses, nonvolatile memory, which,
unlike conventional DRAM and SRAM, does not lose the
data when power is cut, is being seen as increasingly
important in the memory area. "Until now, the mainstream
in nonvolatile memory has been products such as EEPROM
and flash memory that are used like read only memory
(ROM) since they can only be rewritten a few times.
These products are widely used in digital consumer
products such as digital cameras and cellular phones,
and the market for these products has been growing
steadily."
However, since these storage media are used mainly
in a read-only functionality, they are inferior to
DRAM and SRAM in some ways, for example, write speeds.
"That is, the applications for this type of memory
are quite limited. However, several types of nonvolatile
RAM that use new materials have been developed recently,
including FeRAM, which uses ferroelectric films, MRAM,
which uses ferromagnetic materials, ovonic unified
memory (OUM), which uses phase-change calcogenide
alloys.
These new memories feature both large numbers of write
cycles and high speed. (See figure
7.) The application of these devices in digital
consumer products will be studied extensively to take
advantage of their features." These new material based
nonvolatile memories are expected to be used not only
as large-capacity standard memory units but as embedded
memory in future system LSIs.
Recently, LSI technologies have been developed that
support flexible and immediate programming of the
LSI logic functionality even after the chip has been
embedded in a system. Dr. Makimoto commented on these
technologies as follows.
"Since these technologies allow the LSI logic functions
to be reconfigured, they are called reconfigurable
technologies. Several technologies are currently under
investigation in various countries and in many venture
capital companies around the world. Sony developed
the world's first reconfigurable LSI optimized for
consumer products, the "Virtual Mobile Engine™.
(See figure
8.)" This Virtual Mobile Engine™,
which consumes 1/4 the power of conventional LSIs,
is used in the latest Network Walkman, and contributes
to significantly longer battery life in that product.
The
Second Wave Will Impact Digital Consumer Products
Dr. Makimoto then developed the following
outlook for the semiconductor business. "According
to the Makimoto's Wave model I have described, the
next 5 years should be a period in which field programmability
becomes a key technology. After that, the model predicts
that the industry will swing to the customization
side again as shown in figure
9, and system LSI technologies, such as system
on chip (SoC) and system in package (SiP) will return
to the forefront. It can be said that the key technologies
at that time will be maskless technologies that reduce
the increasing mask costs, superconnector technologies
that can support complex multilevel wiring technologies,
and e-business that can take full advantage of networks."
Advances and progress are made every day in many aspects
associated with the semiconductor business, including
the market, products, and technologies. Dr. Makimoto
concluded by discussing Sony's stance towards the
digital consumer business based on the historical
path to date.
"In the 1970s, a wave of analog consumer equipment,
TVs and VCRs, swept over the world. Following that,
the 1980s saw the first digital wave, centered on
the personal computer, and by the 1990s, the analog
wave was gone. The second digital wave, which began
in the 1990s and continues to the present, is characterized
by digital consumer products and networks. Now, in
the twenty-first century, the second wave has grown
to the point of dwarfing the first wave. (See figure
10.) I hope that Sony, which centers its business
around digital consumer products, can nurture the
digital dreams of the next generation while taking
leadership of both the business and technology areas."
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Dynamic Reconfigurable Circuit Technology "Virtual
Mobile Engine™"
Technology that Significantly Reduces Power
Consumption
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Dynamic reconfigurable circuits
are not divided into circuits with predefined
functions as conventional LSIs are. These devices
function by responding when needed by changing
dynamically, through software, the connection
configuration and operation settings of several
circuit units provided in advance. (See the conceptual
overview figure.) Until now, reducing power consumption
was seen as a serious issue for application of
this technology in LSIs for consumer mobile equipment.
However, in 2002, Sony developed the Virtual Mobile
Engine™ as
a method for achieving significant power reductions
and miniaturization in LSIs for audio/visual products.
This circuit technology, which can reduce power
consumption by approximately 1/4 over conventional
general-purpose digital signal processors (DSP),
was adopted for use in the CXR704060 LSI used
in the Network Walkman "NW-MS70D". (See the photograph
in figure
8.) This represents the world's first adoption
of this technology in an LSI used in a consumer
product.
[Conceptual Overview]
Dedicated circuits are used
for functions (1), (2) and (3).
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Examples
Function (1): Combines a,
b, and c.
Function (2): Combines a, c, and d.
Function (3): Combines b, c, and d. |
| The dedicated
circuits (1), (2) and (3) are created by
combining circuit units a, b, c and d. |
| Conventional LSI Circuit |
Reconfigurable Circuit |
Network Walkman "NW-MS70D" with Checkout USB Cradle
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See all articles with figures and tables.
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Vol.33
