Adapting Logic to an Evolving Market Environment
TI's advanced and differentiated logic products offer a wide range of price-performance options for true one-stop logic shopping
In the early 1980s, the general public learned that "chips" were not only
snack foods but also the insect-like rectangular gadgets that swarmed on
circuit boards in those amazing new personal computers. These devices
integrated hundreds or perhaps a few thousand transistors to perform the basic logic functions that are the building blocks of complex digital electronics. Today, the once-plentiful logic chips seem scarce, having been gobbled up by larger application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and programmable logic devices (PLDs) that gather many logic functions into a single component. To the casual observer, traditional logic devices -- simply "logic" in the IC industry --seem to be nearing extinction, killed off by the rapid evolution of digital electronics.
But contrary to appearances, logic is alive and thriving. Insight/Onsite,
a market research firm specializing in logic, reports that logic components
have fallen from 90 percent of the integrated circuits on boards some 20 years ago to 30 percent today. However, during that time the actual number of logic devices shipped has risen to more than 8 billion units per year. Indeed, markets continue to increase very rapidly for some categories of logic, such as advanced bus interfaces, growing at a 28 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) during the 1990s.
Why logic continues to be healthy
The reasons for the continued health of the logic market are not difficult
to identify. ASICs and PLDs may have stolen much of the market for glue logic, the interface components between larger ICs such as processors and controllers. But designers still need basic logic for flexibility, since a highly integrated ASIC or PLD may not offer the best solution in specific cases. Some functions, for example, may be physically isolated and not make sense for integration. In other cases, design modifications that would be too costly or time-consuming to integrate are relatively straightforward with additional logic. For instance, as systems move to 64-bit and wider bus widths, offloading bus interface functions from ASICs may lower costs by keeping pin counts down.
These continued uses for traditional functions point to the main trend in
the logic market: increasingly, logic has evolved to fill differentiated design niches. As systems become more complex, logic has become more varied in what it offers. Logic vendors strive to identify trends in end equipment design and to introduce products that meet the specialized needs of these applications. One of the companies that has been among the most successful IC vendors in meeting the needs of the changing logic market is Texas Instruments.
A successful strategy for market adaptation
In the 1970s, TI created the logic market and it has maintained its
leadership through the years. Insight/Onsite reports that TI's share of the total U.S. logic market in 1996 was 32 percent -- half again as large as its nearest competitor. While TI continues to be a leading supplier of traditional transistor-to-transistor (TTL) logic, it has also pioneered in new areas such as low-voltage logic. In 1996, the company provided more than half of the 3.3-V logic sold in the market, according to Insight/Onsite. In all, TI offers one of the widest selections of logic in the industry, comprising more than 5,000 products in more than 20 families, with solutions for a wide range of price and performance.
TI owes its success to careful identification of market needs, together
with the design expertise and manufacturing process strengths that are required to create products for specific applications. The company's strategy is to offer a number of logic families that are targeted at different balances of price versus performance. Additionally, TI identifies differentiated niche markets for which it develops specialized logic products. End equipment areas that TI specifically targets with its logic families and specialized logic products include telecommunications and networking, RISC workstations, desktop PCs and notebook computers. By carefully matching its designs and processes with the requirements of these end equipments, the company continues to adapt and grow its logic business successfully in a changing market environment.
Among the important requirements driving the logic market today are high
performance, portability and live insertion or "plug and play." These
requirements are not altogether new: greater performance has always been a
design goal in electronics, while portability and live insertion are recent
developments in the ongoing effort to make electronic equipment smaller and
easier to use. What is new in the 1990s are the enabling technologies used to meet these requirements, including lower operating voltages, new standards for bus signals and signal switching and advanced packaging. TI addresses each of these technologies with different groups of logic products designed for optimal combinations of available functions, switching speed, power consumption, drive current, low noise from electromagnetic interference (EMI), conformity with standards, package options and price.
Price-performance options for 5-V and 3.3-V systems
A few key products illustrate both the range and degree of differentiation
of the TI logic portfolio. TI continues to leverage its process strengths to create a variety of standard logic lines. For instance, high-performance 5-V applications benefit from advanced BiCMOS technology (ABT), which offers the broadest variety of functions and bit-width options, lowest noise, high drive and live insertion. ABT becomes increasingly important as data buses move to 32-, 64- and higher bit widths for high-performance computer systems, ATM/SONET communications switches and other high-throughput equipments.
In 1996, TI announced the availability of the advanced high-speed CMOS
(AHC) family of 5-V logic products. AHC technology operates three times as
fast as high-speed CMOS (HCMOS), a widely used standard logic technology, but with half the power consumption and equivalent low noise. The new AHC devices cost the same as equivalent HCMOS devices and are a drop-in replacement, providing a reliable and effortless migration path for HCMOS users. Recently, TI added 16-bit Widebus ™ devices to its AHC offerings, giving designers new options that can help reduce component counts, board space and overall system cost.
TI's leadership in low-voltage logic comes from price-performance
differentiation through five product families -- advanced high-speed CMOS
(AHC), low-voltage (LV), low-voltage CMOS (LVC), low-voltage technology (LVT) and advanced low-voltage CMOS (ALVC). These product families operate at either 3.3 V or both 5 V and 3.3 V, with a variety of speed, noise and drive characteristics, as well as other features, all of which serve to provide a wide range of price-performance options to system designers. For these and many other TI logic products, customers can find alternate sources and reassurance of supply in products from Philips and Hitachi. In the near future, TI plans to supplement its 3.3-V families with logic supporting even lower voltage levels.
Adaptations to specialized markets
Some differentiated products target niches in specific types of systems,
especially those using specialized bus architectures or switching standards. Differentiated products support systems based on buses such as FutureBus+, PCI, VME64, PCMCIA, P1284, and switching standards such as GTL, ETL, HSTL and BTL. For example, the GTL1655 Universal Bus Transceiver (UBT ™) enhances the low power consumption and high speed of Gunning transceiver logic (GTL) with the high drive of Backplane Transceiver Logic (BTL). Designers of high-speed telecom switches and network routers can now substitute the low-power GTL and GTL+ switching standards for BTL, significantly lowering power consumption without a loss in speed.
Another differentiated product, the SSTL16837 Universal Bus Driver,
provides the industry's first solution for driving 3.3-V address signals from a low-voltage memory controller to SDRAMs using Stub Series Terminated Logic (SSTL) technology. In high-speed memory subsystems operating at system speeds in excess of 75 MHz, such as those found in workstations and servers, the SSTL16837 provides fast address signaling with minimal propagation delay.
A specialized product line, TI's CBTLV switches are the industry's first
family of digitally controlled switches to combine 3.3-V operation with the
switching benefits of cross-bar technology (CBT). Low-voltage CBT (CBTLV)
switches will help simplify designs, reduce power requirements, and support the migration from 5-V systems altogether in notebook PCs and other low-voltage systems. Applications of the switches include PCI bus isolation for hot docking support, and event monitoring and device isolation from the PCI bus for system power management. A device in a related CBT family, the CBTD3384, introduced in 1996, was the industry's first single-chip bi-directional translator between 5-V and 3.3-V signaling environments.
Innovative design features and advanced packaging
Many of TI's logic products owe their preeminence to innovative design
features. For instance, output edge rate control (OEC ™) minimizes
high-frequency noise for greater system reliability. Bus holds eliminate the need for external pull-up resistors on floating inputs, helping reduce power requirements, cost and layout time for the entire design. Live-insertion capabilities such as power-up 3-state outputs support the insertion of circuit cards into a backplane while the system is operating, protecting components from damage and the system from signal interruption for seamless operation. JTAG options on many of TI's logic components help simplify manufacturing testing and field maintenance.
In packaging, TI also maintains its leadership. TI was the first in the
industry to introduce 16- and 18-bit Widebus and Shrink Widebus ™ packages to minimize chip counts, board space and noise for bus interface use in advanced systems. The PCMCIA-compatible thin very small-outline package (TVSOP), introduced in 1996, was the industry's first high-speed package to reduce the footprint of shrink small-outline packages (SSOPs) by 40 to 60 percent. And TI's line of Microgate logic products offer single gate logic devices in extremely small five-pin packages that can be retrofitted onto circuit boards to economically modify existing designs.
Wide-ranging general and differentiated products provide one-stop logic
shopping
These products and product families illustrate TI's breadth and depth in
logic, a unique combination that has kept the company at the forefront of the logic industry. In the future, TI will continue to leverage its strengths in design, process technologies and packaging to adapt to an evolving market for digital logic. An enormous range of advanced and differentiated products targeted at different levels of price and performance serve to meet the needs of TI's customers throughout the industry, making the company truly a one-stop logic shop.
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