Jerry McGuire, vice president, general purpose dsp group, Analog Devices

CS In 2006 you were keynote speaker at Embedded World and looked at the role the embedded systems design community played in delivering the digital future. How has this role evolved in 2009? JM The embedded systems design community continues to drive incredible advances that evolve the digital future unto the digital present. Our design engineer customers innovate around our technologies. We provide them with the ability to do wonderful new things they couldn't do otherwise; things they can imagine and only need the technology to make a reality. There's a whole world out there of incredibly innovative embedded systems developers. It is our responsibility as the providers of core technology to give those embedded systems innovators everything we possibly can so they can bring their vision to reality in the form of product. That's our entire focus at ADI. Let me illustrate what I am talking about with some examples of how our customers are developing innovative technologies with Blackfin and SHARC: En-vision’s ScripTalk product is an automated prescription reader for people with sight impairments. Its designers were looking for a way to reduce costs and development time while still delivering a user friendly, low power solution. In previous designs the company used both a microcontroller and a TTS chip set to integrate all of its functionality. In its current design the product utilizes RFID and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies running on a “convergent” Blackfin processor. The Blackfin satisfied En-Vision’s requirement for a single processing engine that can simultaneously implement the ScripTalk Station’s intuitive user interface, high-quality audio output and accurate TTS signal processing on a single platform. Another product that comes to mind is Yamaha Corporation’s digital home theatre receivers. These systems are among the most challenging of consumer electronics applications. Yamaha is using a single Blackfin processor in its RX-V563, RX-V463 and DSP-AX463 receivers to perform digital signal processing including multichannel audio decoding and post-processing. The Blackfin is also performing microcontroller functions that handle system control and drive the interface through on-screen displays on connected TVs or monitors. By designing with Blackfin Yamaha has been able to reduce its overall system cost and time to market while at the same time provide its customers with a high-end audio experience from a moderately priced receiver. And finally, here’s a great product design story from the folks at Universal Audio in Scotts Valley, CA. Universal Audio’s DSP accelerator cards and powered software plug-ins allow digital audio workstations to reproduce the capabilities of studio gear from companies like Neve and Roland. With the next-generation of their UAD-2 DSP accelerator card Universal Audio’s goals included levels of power and flexibility that would outdo their initial product and leapfrog the competition. Unwilling to let processor limitations get in the way of their concept, the engineers chose our SHARC 21369 to drive the UAD-2 PCIe DSP card. Using SHARC has enabled the UAD-2 to achieve stunning performance increases compared to its predecessor without compromising on real-time performance and fast data movement demanded by this type of audio application. These are just a few of the many successes I can talk about but it gives you an idea of how many innovative products we’re involved in bringing to market. CS Do exhibitions still have validity in today's market? JM Exhibitions still have their place in today's market, however the purpose is changing. There's no question about it, people are gathering in new ways both physically and virtually. Social networking and social media have become a great way for innovators to interact with each other on a real-time basis. However in addition there needs to be an opportunity to complement the virtual interactions with face-to-face human interactions. Customers meet face to face mostly for networking reasons and also for educational purposes. In today’s economy it is now more important than ever for engineers to network with each other and their partners. Now of course in this economy budgets have been dramatically restricted across the board. This means that our customer audience isn't traveling to exhibitions as much as they were previously. The embedded systems industry is managing its expenses responsibly, and this includes making choices about how to spend marketing dollars. At ADI, we are focused on our new product innovation strategies in addition towards supporting a huge number of customer design efforts. That has to be our first priority as with anyone in the industry. We will continue to choose those exhibition opportunities that bring us face-to-face with our customers and our partners in the design community so that we can have meaningful interactions with them. Interactions that expose them to our technology and enable them to create the things they want to create for their markets. CS Which sectors do you think will fare best in the current economic downturn - and why? JM It's an interesting market right now. Volume shipments are down across the board in the semiconductor sector. On the other hand design activity is going crazy. Companies are thinking about how they will compete in the market with products that they will bring to the market this year and the year after. And they are making those key design decisions right now. At ADI we're finding a significant number of companies committing to our Blackfin and SHARC processors. This means that we have a responsibility to continue to invest in R&D, to follow our processor roadmap and to bring the most innovative processors to market. This allows our customers to build the things they need to be competitive with their products. At ADI, our diversification among 10’s of thousands of customers places our technology in every market. Over the years as we watched some markets get hot and some markets turn cold but because of our diversification, we see new opportunities continue to bubble up. Industrial applications have been quite resilient but other markets like automotive continues to innovate through differentiation in electronics. In addition, I also think that consumer electronics manufacturers will continue to be very clever in the features and performance they create in their devices. CS What are the challenges of specialising in such a quickly evolving industry? JM Specialising is really the wrong way to look at it. What you have to do to be a successful driver in an evolving market is to be able to give designers a good deal of flexibility in the way they can use technology to create exactly what their customers need. That's why we continue to focus our core capabilities on extremely powerful programmable processor architectures. If you look at processor families like Blackfin and SHARC, you will see that we have been absolutely consistent in giving engineers a programmable platform for innovation. CS What has been your biggest motivation while at Analog Devices? JM My biggest personal motivation has been the opportunity to witness the variety of incredible things our customers do with the technologies we've delivered here at ADI. Every day I know there is a really good possibility that I'm going to see something I've never seen before from one of our customers. The customers I get to interact with use our stuff to do things they just couldn't do otherwise. That to me is a fantastic experience. I believe we’re changing the world behind the scenes, one design at a time with the processors we innovate here at ADI. What other motivation could I possibly want?