EE Times Under The Hood - October 8, 2007 - (Page 1) www.eetimes.com • www.techonline.com EDITORIAL Presented by: The art of war BY PATRICK MANNION and Electronics Group President Paul Miller Vice President/Publisher, EE Times Ross Ayotte Vice President/Editorial Director Richard Wallace Editorial Director, Under the Hood Project, and Editor in Chief,TechOnline Patrick Mannion Editor in Chief, EE Times Junko Yoshida Art Director Debee Rommel Assistant Art Director Lynda Conley Copy Editors Diana Scheben Barbara Dugan MANUFACTURING Donna Ambrosino, Group publishing services manager, Electronics Group and Channel o it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will win a hundred times in a hundred battles. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you win one and lose the next. If you do not know yourself or your enemy, you will always lose. Extracted from “The Art of War,” by Sun Tzu. S Karla Kotlarz, Kim LaSusa EE Times advertising coordinators CMP MEDIA LLC Steve Weitzner, President and Chief Executive Officer Adam Marder, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Tony Uphoff, President, CMP Business Technology Group Robert Faletra, President, CMP Channel Paul Miller, President, CMP Electronics Group Philip Chapnick, President, CMP Game, Dobb’s, ICMI Group Anne Marie Miller, Corporate Senior Vice President, Sales Marvlieu Jolla Hall, Senior Vice President, Human Resources Marie Myers, Senior Vice President, Manufacturing Alexandra Raine, Senior Vice President, Communications Copyright® 2007 All Rights Reserved, Printed in the USA, CMP Media LLC, 600 Community Drive Manhasset, N.Y. 11030 I don’t draw on Sun Tzu’s immortal work on warfare lightly, but I was reminded of its underlying philosophy recently, thanks to an e-mail exchange with a reader. In that exchange, we explored the worthiness and usefulness of teardowns in the context of innovation, or lack thereof. The reader was responding to an article I wrote on business intelligence, i.e., knowing what the competition is doing and drawing upon that acquired knowledge to further one’s own designs. He argued: “It doesn’t hurt to know about past designs. But competitors’ history or intentions are unimportant. You can’t innovate by ‘anticipating.’ This implies that the competition already is superior and you are not innovating at all. One must innovate by improving on designs or products. This has to do with current designs and products, but not with fictitious concepts such as ‘intentions.’ ” It’s just copying, not innovating That’s a fair statement, but he was making the point that copying is wrong and that knowing what the competition is doing has no value in the context of innovation. I’m sure we all agree wholeheartedly that copying, while it can be the best form of flattery, is morally wrong. In fact, this installment of Under the Hood explores the issue of counterfeit ICs, their source, and how to avoid getting caught in the counterfeit trap (see page 58). However, I disagree that innovation should take place in a vacuum, without any knowledge of recent designs. Aside from it being just plain fun to see what’s inside the latest cutting-edge systems, teardowns provide insight into decisions made in the design process. They answer questions like what chips, technologies and techniques were used to achieve the designers’ goal? What obstacles were encountered and how were they overcome? What mistakes were made and what was learned? For example, the designers of the Maserati remote-controlled car took some shortcuts when it came to the power supply and also didn’t factor in environmental differences—and they got hit hard (see page 70). The Pioneer VSX-1016TXV A/V receiver was designed to beat the competition in cost/performance and did so using every tool in the designers’ arsenal, from eliminating some passive components to squeezing all the required code onto a single DSP (page 80). And the list goes on: Semiconductor Insights looks inside the AMD Barcelona quad-core processor to explore the latest in process technologies (page 54), while Portelligent shows how to ruggedize a mobile phone for extreme users (page 28). This third volume of teardowns, combined with the constantly evolving site www.techonline.com/underthehood, serves as yet one more arrow to add to your quiver of design intelligence. While the innovation to compete in a global environment must still come from within, looking at what came before and learning from others’ mistakes is always useful. So, add this volume to your arsenal, draw on it for the inspiration it is intended to provide, and send along suggestions for future teardowns you want to see. Enjoy! October 8, 2007 | Electronic Engineering Times, TechOnline 1 http://www.eetimes.com http://www.techonline.com http://www.techonline.com/underthehood
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