Everything but Wives and Kids

Yes indeed, Apple’s unveiling of the iPad took center stage in the high-tech news last week. But as Steve Job’s show went on, another interesting piece of information hit the wire. According to analysts’ latest reports, Samsung is on track to overtake HP as the world biggest technology company by sales. I think this is pretty impressive considering where the company was fifteen years ago. But make no mistake: such successes do not happen by chance.

Samsung’s inexorable drive was ignited in the early 90’s when the chairman called Samsung workers to “change everything but their wives and kids”. This call and commitment to innovation is remarkable and the results achieved by the Korean giant can only give reason to advocates of change. Samsung executives not only were able to identify an opportunity, they also changed to seize it, which is clearly the hardest part.

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In years of experience in the industry, I have witnessed – and sometimes helped – many electronic design companies go through the process of change. Fundamentally, I would say that there are three main motivations for organizations to embrace change. The first one, as Samsung did, is to recognize and seize a new opportunity. These strategic moves then tend to have the highest payback, but in our risk-averse environment, few are the companies capable of this. Another approach to change involves the “insurance” factor. Wise decision makers try to anticipate potential threats in future projects and adapt consequently. Lastly, at the other extreme of the spectrum, are companies trying to fix a broken design process. While operating under such high pressure and urgency is really not comfortable, this reactive approach to change seems to be the one of the majority. 

Consider how we implement ASICs there days: the design process hasn’t fundamentally changed since we first adopted HDLs in the mid-90’s. We still start by creating our specifications, then manually refining them and coding RTL by hand, only to find that it is not working, or too big, or both, and iterating again and again, until, with little time remaining we are urged to move on and settle with what we have done. What hasn’t changed, however, is the time it takes to debug and verify these digital beasts. What hasn’t changed, however, is the number of ECOs and respins. What hasn’t changed, however, are the financial consequences of product slips. 

How long will we cope with all this? Do we like so much spending week-ends in the lab that we don’t want to improve our methodologies?

Will you wait for everything to fall apart to start considering the option of change? Or will you, like Samsung and others, recognize and seize the opportunity offered by increased automation in the design process?

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