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EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS - Philips Semiconductors is rolling out a corporatewide "platform strategy" that seeks to deploy a common design methodology and common process technologies among all groups within the company. The strategy is a linchpin of Philips' effort to build a successful business model for reusable hardware and software.
In pursuit of the holy grail of reusable cores, "we've just completed rearranging the organization," said Guenther Dengel, managing director of consumer systems at Philips Semiconductors.
The new business model, which has been two years in the making, targets digital TVs, telecommunications handsets and digital audio as the first applications for the company's platform strategy. The mission of the consumersystems group is "to make sure that if there is an audio block developed by one group within Philips Semiconductors, for example, it can be dropped into a system design being designed by another group," Dengel said.
The whole process-requiring painful steps at times-has affected "more than 300 technical managers running Philips Semiconductors' operations," including sites in Nijmegen, Netherlands; Caen, France; Southampton, U.K.; Hamburg, Germany; and Taipei, Taiwan, Dengel said. Those operationsformerly divided by geographic boundaries and along such technological lines as RF, audio or other ICs for TVs, microcontrollers or digital video-are now far more horizontally organized and integrated, lining up behind specific products or projects.
Theo Claasen, chief technology officer at Philips Semiconductors, said in a recent interview with EE Times that there is no such thing as a general-purpose architecture that fits all digital consumer products. Nonetheless, he said, it is possible to identify an architecture that's generic enough to suit such varied application domains as digital...