Parallel streams Electronics
Manufacturing Services (EMS)
and Electronics Design
Services (EDS) have about 15-years
time lag in each of their life cycle
maturity as a stand-alone industry.
From a loose army of independent
consultants, last six years of this
decade saw an increasing
consolidation of EDS market to start
offering full suit of services to the
customer OEMs, ODMs and
semiconductor device
manufacturers.After years of
working as satellites to EMS, EDA,
distribution and other industrial
segment companies, EDS is now
ready for prime time. Initially,
customers as well as EDS players,
were content to seek and get only
niche areas of consulting. But as the
product complexity and higher
levels of complexity and integration
grew, it became very apparent that
piece-meal approach to product
design would only shift out the
product release window. This is
indeed an opportunity for correction
in EDS where only companies with
deep technical expertise across
several horizontal and vertical layers
can stand up and prosper to the
next league. Intellectual property
and pre-fabricated building blocks
will be the key differentiator
between the players.
What is end-to-end offering
from an EDS perspective? An
absolute ability to create a
customisable and configurable
building block to a completely
tested and volume production
worthy design.
TheASIC/FPGA/BoardDesign/
Embedded Software Design,
Protocol integration and
performance tuning and full
regression testing will only qualify
under that definition.
Product design
layers
Depending on the process
maturity levels at the customer
place, EDS companies get a one
pager block diagram to a fully
crafted engineering as a basis
for estimation.
Typical product design can be
broadly partitioned as follows:
* IP blocks identification and
sourcing
* Custom silicon development
(ASIC or FPGA)
* Custom board design
* Platform software
When a product OEM/ODM
narrows the search for their next
EDS partner, they will be forced to
look for a partner who has the
track record as well as the portfolio
of all of the above to minimise the
product introduction risks as well
as to maintain the costs of
development to budgeted levels.
Newer territories, process maturity
of partners will be the best
insurance against failure of all
pieces not working together.
Horizontal tasks
Apart from doing a full product
design, end-to-end offerings can
also be utilised in fulfilling
customers’ horizontal tasks:
# Board design: Library
development, symbol creation
# FPGA design: IP creation,
validation, IP integration, standard
interfaces, full chip integration,
verification, synthesis and
bit-file generation
# ASIC design: RTL coding,
verification and backend related
tasks, full large chip design
outsourcing from RTL to GDS2
# Embedded Software: Every
aspect of embedded software from
diagnostics to BSP porting to device
driver development and testing
# Testing and certification
....CONTD
