Cambridge Consultants Ltd (CCL) announces a novel service that allows enterprises without specialist electronics skills to exploit the benefits of ‘system on chip’ (SoC) technology. The application areas expected to derive greatest benefit are industrial control and instrumentation, automotive, healthcare devices and equipment, and consumer appliances, all areas where electronics is usually an aid to a product's core function.

The unique service delivers step changes in cost and performance and enables the creation of new product categories through a total product approach to the specification and design of integrated electronics. For manufacturers moving products such as gas meters and electrical switchgear from electromechanical systems to solid-state devices, for example, these improvements can often mean saving as much as 60% of the manufacturing cost.

The cost, and performance gains that single-chip solutions provide can often stimulate a very substantial advance in product performance. CCL’s experienced, multi-disciplinary team takes an impartial view of the latest technologies to help companies explore the art-of-the-possible, and establish how SoC technology’s cost and performance advantages can benefit their products. This approach delivers gains beyond product functionality and simpler bill of materials, in areas from manufacturing strategy to in-the-field issues such as maintenance and upgrades, for example.

Once the business case is established, CCL employs tried-and-tested specification and design processes, along with its unique intellectual property for emulation and test, to ensure right-first-time design, and maximum yield from the silicon wafer. This approach means SoC technology can sometimes be justified for production volumes as low as 20,000 units/year.

"SoC developments can easily strip 30% from manufacturing costs, and at the same time make products smaller, lighter and more reliable," says Ian Halliday-Pegg of CCL. "But many companies lack the skills to specify the effective use of SoC technology."

"Our approach is to field engineers with extensive experience in designing product architectures, to work on the overall product specification and increase the scope for cost reduction. This way, we are able to drive cost out of the electronics, analogue devices such as sensors, and production and test procedures, and optimise a design for use in future products or elsewhere within a product family."

As an example of the benefits, a 'mixed-signal' (analogue and digital) SoC might reduce the electronic control system inside a product from a PCB to one low-cost chip, while simultaneously adding new capabilities such as wireless communications. Further gains are possible, such as a reduction of component costs, by exploiting digital signal processing techniques to compensate for lower cost sensors. Shifting the conventional boundaries of the role of electronics in this way is one of the many value-added possibilities that SoC technology can deliver.

CCL has extensive experience of SoC and ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) development, for electronic OEMs such as mobile phone manufacturers, and non-electronic OEMs such as healthcare and industrial manufacturers. The company’s experience in this field led to the spin-out of the leading Bluetooth chip maker, CSR.

"The insight that CCL can bring would be difficult to match even if a company already has electronics experience, as the possibilities that today’s chip and software technologies offer for rethinking product and system architectures are evolving so rapidly that only a highly-engaged team of hardware and software professionals can provide the best advice," adds Ian Halliday-Pegg.

In addition to design services, CCL has its own library of interoperable digital and analogue intellectual property (IP) - which has been field proven on design projects, many involving multi-million production quantities. This resource addresses the single most important criteria that electronic OEMs have when selecting IP - following a component's fundamental performance: the availability of all the functions required from one supplier*.

More information: www.cambridgeconsultants.com/asic_home.shtml

*In a recent Electronics Weekly survey on third party IP, over a quarter of respondents rated the availability of all the required IP blocks, pre-verified to run together, as the most important criteria for choosing a supplier, following the actual specification of the IP itself. Published in Electronics Weekly [UK], 9th October 2002; also available at: www.electronicsweekly.co.uk