Interface IP in Consumer Electronics

What is the consumer marketplace? It is a bit of a tautology, but it is electronic products bought by consumers. As the famous advertising executive David Ogilvy said (in 1955), "the consumer is not an moron, she is your wife." Of course back in that era, before even Mad Men days, most wives didn't work, whereas today, at least here in Silicon Valley, she is more likely to be a software engineer or a marketing director. But consumer electronics is the sort of stuff that we (and our wives) can go and buy on Amazon or in Best Buy for a few hundred dollars and keep in our living room. The market blurs at the edges since smartphones (and tablets) are considered a completely separate market (see my blog on Mobile), and devices for the Internet of Things (IoT) have their own category, too.

If I look around my living room, the things I consider consumer electronics are a flat-screen TV, a set-top-box, a cable modem, a wireless router, an Apple TV box, a Blu-ray player (that I rarely use any more), a printer/copier, and a digital camera. There's also an iPhone (but that's mobile), a Fitbit (IoT), and a Pebble watch (IoT). Just looking at that list it goes without saying that the market is fragmented. ...And that I need to get out more.

The key driver for this market is cost. Of course, like every chip, PPA (power, performance, and area) is important. Some devices are battery powered and so power is important. Even tethered devices have to work in a living room environment without fans or other expensive cooling mechanisms. Because the consumer is very price-sensitive, low prices are needed to drive volume, meaning that area (which is the major component of cost) is paramount. Performance is usually less critical, good enough performance within the power and cost requirements is the tradeoff.

In general, the semiconductor content is manufactured in non-leading-edge nodes, which are cheaper. The big exception is gaming, which tends to require the most advanced processes to get the CPU and GPU performance needed. One challenge is the availability of IP. Not all blocks are available in older processes, either because the processes were created before IP-based design became dominant, or sometimes that the performance is inadequate for certain types of interface such as USB3. A sweet spot could turn out to be 28nm since it is available from all the major foundries, there is a wide range of existing IP, and there is a lot of capacity in place with high yields. Since 28nm is a planar process that doesn't require double patterning, it is also cheap to manufacture and relatively straightforward to design compared to more advanced nodes. In fact Cadence just backported their 16nm LPDDR4/DDR4 PHY from 16nm to 28nm specifically for the consumer market.

The market is very diverse in terms of products, but historically the successful products have been those ones all around my living room that I listed earlier:

• Television
• Set-top box/digital video recorder (STB/DVR)
• Blu-ray players (not so much any more)
• Printers, copiers, faxes
• Digital cameras
• Gaming consoles
• Routers

The heart of almost every one of these products is a chip that contains a microprocessor and runs the software that gives the device its intelligence. Sometimes there are sensors for motion or images. Today, most consumer electronics are connected to other consumer electronics. For example, my STB is connected to my TV (of course) with HDMI, as is my Apple TV and my Blu-Ray. My cable modem is connected to my wireless router by Ethernet. And so on.

As a result there is a spectrum of different interfaces that are important in different markets:

• HDTV, set-top-box, Blu-Ray: Uses HDMI, DDR4/LPDDR4, USB3/2, SATA, PCIe3, Ethernet, BT Dual Mode, Wi-Fi, Zigbee, SD/SDIO
• Printer: Uses USB3/2, DDR4/LPDDR4, Wi-Fi, Ethernet, SD/SDIO
• Digital camera: Uses USB2, LPDDR4/3/DDR4/3 , MIPI, SD, HDMI, Wi-Fi, Zigbee
• Gaming console: Uses DDR4, USB3/2, HDMI, Wi-Fi, PCIe3, SATA, Bluetooth, MIPI, sensors, NFC
• WiFi router: Uses Wi-Fi, Ethernet, USB3/2, DSL

Some companies will build their own IP for some of these interfaces, but many will simply license the IP they require. In most cases, they are using IP that is used in other markets too, piggybacking on the fact that the IP already exists. Very few of these standards are driven by the consumer marketplace directly. At Cadence, we are leaders in memory interface IP and also have pretty much all the IP that is SerDes-based, which is most of them these days. Learn more about Cadence's Interface IP solutions.