An interview with Walden Rhines, CEO, Mentor Graphics

By Chris Ciufo, group editorial director, Open Systems Publishing

Editor Chris Ciufo conducted an exclusive interview with Mentor’s CEO after his keynote speech “Adversity Builds Opportunity” at GSPx in late 2006. Edited excerpts follow.

Ciufo: Isn’t the whole FPGA and DSP design process too complex?

Rhines: Everything is too complex. Looking at these, the issues are first of all, simply understanding DSP well enough that you can deal with algorithms; and second, looking at the issues of reducing those algorithms to executable code in a programmable DSP or to executable hardware in an FPGA. It may still be difficult for a college graduate who’s had training in digital signal processing, but I think we will absolutely get past that. It’s very clear to me that more and more people deal with C – and less and less with individual optimization at the assembly language level. C takes you out of the complexity of putting an algorithm directly into Verilog or VHDL or even SystemVerilog. That is an enormous simplification.

Ciufo: Will FPGAs ever find their way into the ultimate high-volume market of cell phones?

Rhines: I was somewhat skeptical until last year at the SEMICO conference when NTT DoCoMo showed a Sony cell phone that had a very small FPGA inside. So it has happened. Now I think the continuum says that if you want the lowest cost and the best performance, a full custom design is the way to get there. And the problem is that with a cell phone, usually you are under intense cost pressure and you’re trying to minimize the number of chips. So doing an FPGA in a cell phone is probably a temporary solution at best.

Ciufo: Is it a detriment to technology that there are so few fabs in the world, and that they’re in the hands of only a few suppliers?

Rhines: For standard processes, for analog, for power, for RF, and so on, the diversity of processes offered by standard foundries is very limited. So you see companies such as ON Semiconductor becoming totally internal, whereas they used to buy a lot from foundries. ON recently bought the LSI Logic fab in Gresham, Oregon and they’re moving a large share of their designs into that fab. They view it as a differentiator. I think you’re getting the differentiation where it’s justified. It may be unfortunate that we can’t have as many companies as we used to in the past building wafers, but that’s just an economic reality. And they are pretty well spread around the world, though heavily concentrated in Asia.

Ciufo: In light of innovation in semiconductors, how do you see it affecting applications?

Rhines: The principal things limiting most of the applications visible today – video processing, mobile video, video in the home, video iPods, MPEG, MP3 players, and so on – are performance and cost. NAND flash comes down a pretty steep learning curve, but there really is no limit to consumption. You say, “Gee, I’d really like to download a movie and play it on the TV like I do with TiVo, and I’d like to do it on my iPod or my PC.”

Well, the pipes are probably the biggest limiter on downloading content. But even the processing capability can limit things too.

If you’re going to put WiMAX together with EDGE and GPRS or 3G and a single chip is going to process all those, it’s got to be a really big chip. We are truly limited in what you can do with the processing power of the chips we have today. If everybody has enough processing and starts downloading video, the common carriers will then have to expand the pipes. So we’re still about a year or two or three short of the performance and cost points that will enable some tremendously exciting applications.

Walden C. Rhines is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mentor Graphics, a leader in worldwide electronic design automation with a revenue of $792 million in 2006. Prior to joining Mentor Graphics, Rhines was Executive Vice President of Texas Instruments’ Semiconductor Group. During his 21 years at TI, Rhines managed TI’s thrust into digital signal processing. He was also responsible for development of the first TI speech synthesis devices (used in “Speak & Spell”). Dr. Rhines holds a bachelor of science degree in metallurgical engineering from the University of Michigan, a master of science and Ph.D. in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, and an M.B.A. from Southern Methodist University.

About the author
Chris Ciufo is the group editorial director for OpenSystems Publishing. He can be reached at cciufo@opensystems-publishing.com.

Copyright 2007, OpenSystems Publishing. This article was reprinted with permission from the "Programmable Logic: FPGAs and reconfigurable computing" supplement of the online publication www.DSP-FPGA.com