July 1996, vol.13, no. 5 DSP news Wireless news Networking news Logic news TI news

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Winning in the next millennium By Gene Frantz, TI Fellow and Applications Manager for DSP Socialtainment. Edutravel. Telecommuting. You may not have heard these words because I think I made up a couple of them. You ought to keep them in mind, though, because they could represent the future of digital signal processing solutions (DSPS). Companies that succeed in DSPS as we enter the next millennium will be those that can shuffle the categories of living as we know them and create new combinations that meet the needs of the networked society. They will combine concepts from our lives today to create new perceptions for tomorrow. These companies will meld entertainment with education, information or socialization to give us edutainment, infotainment or socialtainment. They will merge travel with education or telecommunications to form edutravel or teletravel. And so on. We'll all need new dictionaries, and the game of Scrabble™ will never be the same. How can I predict this with such certainty? Because history indicates that it is true. Think back to the early days of personal computers. You remember dozens, maybe hundreds, of companies that thought they could get rich in this new market. Where are they today? You'll still find some of the names on other products, but few of them are major players in today's thriving PC marketplace. Even huge corporations have dropped out. Why? Perhaps because they failed to adapt. The shakeout we are seeing in PCs is a classic case of survival of the fittest. And survival is an important word as we talk about the future of DSPS in the 21st century. As I understand it, survival is the final stage in product evolution. And, as we go into the next century, DSPS will play a major role in each stage. Let me list the stages: Innovators. An entrepreneur comes up with a revolutionary product, one that can change its industry or create a new one. TI was an innovator in DSPS when it developed the first successful digital signal processors more than a decade ago. The whole area of digital cellular communications is in this stage right now. Followers. Other companies jump on the bandwagon with "Me too" products that copy the innovators but do little to advance the technology. They see surging demand and figure, "Why not just get into this big new market? Why do anything different?" Digital telephone answering devices are an example of this stage. Saturation. As more competitors enter the market, demand tends to slow and consumers become confused as they look for value. Modems are in this stage today. There seem to be hundreds of modems on the market, and you can't tell one whit of difference between them. Survival. A shake-out occurs and only those companies that can return to their roots as innovators remain strong in the marketplace. This is what is happening to PCs. The threats to survival in the DSP world have little to do with the technology. It is safe to say that performance is not a limiting factor because DSP performance is climbing faster than our ability to design applications. Cost is not a limiter because the silicon gets less expensive almost every day. Even power consumption, the newest performance requirement, is not a limiter to the imagination of the innovator as DSPs move from 5V to 3V to 2.5V and on toward 1V. Thinking inside the box is the only real threat to the growth of DSP end equipment makers in the next century. Losing the innovative spirit is the surest way to fall out of the picture of tomorrow's technology. Innovators will reshuffle reality to find new combinations. Designers who keep their companies in the ballgame will be those who imagine the possibilities inherent in DSPS and push those possibilities to new limits. Semiconductor technology is such that TI can boost DSP performance faster than designers can develop new circuitry. So the real challenge is to take existing circuitry from core libraries and put these modules together in new ways. Recombinant circuit design in the key to survival with DSPS into the next millennium. There is always a higher level of innovation. I really am not an advocate of technogibberish. But innovative combinations like socialtainment and edutravel are vital to our future. You might call them "innovival." (Definition: Innovival is the art of deploying the innovation required to be a survivor in the next century.)

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