[opendtv] Re: Recovery based on CE
- From: Eory Frank-p22212 <Frank.Eory@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 8 Jun 2004 16:56:12 -0700
>From: "John Willkie" <johnwillkie@xxxxxxxxxx>
>To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Date: Mon, 7 Jun 2004 21:54:31 -0700
>
>The money at risk versus the market size is quite interesting, Frank.
>
To use a Las Vegas analogy, over the last decade the chipmakers have moved from
playing at a $10 table to playing at a $100 table. But the odds are the same as
they always were.
>I'm not so sure that Aunt Millie is really going to buy a monitor. Won't
>her "DTV transition cost" more on the order of a STB (current retail price <
>$300) if she isn't a cable subscriber? I guess one can always add on an
>antenna, but if she doesn't use one today, it's unlikely she'll need much of
>one in the future.
>
>John Willkie
Before HDTV, people bought TV sets, not monitors. Now the high end of the TV
market is HDTV and it's almost entirely monitors -- ok, monitors with NTSC
tuners, but they're still just monitors as far as DTV is concerned. As the
mandate trickles down to normal TV screen sizes, it will be interesting to see
how Aunt Millie and the TV makers respond with monitors vs. integrated DTV sets.
I agree with you -- I'm not sure Aunt Millie is really going to buy a 19" or
27" CRT monitor, when what she really wanted was a new 19" or 27" NTSC TV set.
But I'm fairly certain she is going to cry foul when the DTV set costs
$200-$300 MORE than its NTSC counterpart -- especially when every other CE
product keeps getting cheaper and cheaper. Either the manufacturers will offer
a cheap monitor to meet her price point (which is under $200 today) or the
retailer will find a way to up-sell her on a more expensive DTV set -- one
which will probably not use a CRT.
Eventually, with volumes, the DTV price adder will fall to something like $50.
But that's still pretty substantial considering that's the price of an
NTSC-ready VCR today.
Regarding the issue of cheap silicon, I thought the keynote address at the
Design Automation Conference was rather timely. I have attached it for Bert's
amusement.
-- Frank
DAC: EDA Needs Quantum Shift
By Jessica Davis -- 6/8/2004
Electronic News
San Diego -- Calling for a completely new way of looking at electronic design
automation, Intel CTO Patrick Gelsinger said that the progression of Moore's
Law will fundamentally change the tools required to design chips.
During his Design Automation Conference keynote address Gelsinger compared
today's design tools and where they need to go to the difference between
Newtonian physics and Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum physics. The
Intel CTO suggested that the industry must completely change the way it looks
at EDA in order to create the tools that will continue to scale chips down.
"Today I want to challenge each one of you to continue in the role you play to
keep Moore's Law alive and well," he said. "That means transistor count doubles
every 18 to 24 months, or each generation. At Intel, we are confident this is
something we can deliver against."
Gelisinger conceded that the entry cost to the industry is rising with the cost
of fabs rocketing.
"But while the entry costs to participate may be rising, the value we deliver
to the final customer continues to exponentially improve as we go forward," he
said. "We can find innovations that will allow us to move forever. Just another
decade. Just another decade into the future."
The challenges the industry faces today are primarily power and leakage,
according to Gelsinger, calling power the only real limiter for Moore's Law in
the next decade.
"Ultimately, design techniques have been focusing on optimizing for frequency
or optimizing for area, but this may result in neither," he said.
Gelsinger discussed some of the techniques Intel is employing to address the
challenge of power, such as the use of strained silicon. In addition, Intel is
looking to trigate transistors to address the issue of leakage. The current
challenge for those trigate transistors is in manufacturing. "We don't know how
to build lots of them yet," he said.
While Intel continues to investigate new materials and techniques to address
old and new challenges, including random dopant fluctuations and the impact of
static and dynamic variations, the industry as a whole must look to design
methodology to address these emerging issues.
"The real challenge is how as an industry we can deal with some of these
challenges," he said.
Some additional techniques Intel has employed include body biasing, stack
effect, and sleep transistors.
"But deterministic techniques can't be used for design tomorrow," he said. "We
need CAD tools to shift their approach."
According to Gelsinger, the industry needs entirely new approaches to design.
"Business as usual is not an option for the CAD industry," he said. "We need a
new way of thinking about chip design for future. This is our challenge and
opportunity."
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