IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2021 - 104

Innovations in Consumer Electronics
Standardization Advances Peripheral Technology
Participation in standardization advances
peripheral technologies in addition to the core
technology. In 1978, ITU-T (International Telecommunication
Union - Telecommunication Standardization
Sector, formerly CCITT: Comite
Consultatif International Telegraphique et
Telephonique) was in the process of standardizing
the next-generation speech coding standard,
G:721,18 based on ADPCM (adaptive differential
pulse code modulation) at a bitrate of 32kb/s.
NEC made multiple proposals for the standard
and finally have its technology employed in
speech-redundancy removal by prediction. The
activities in this standardization advanced
speech coding technologies in NEC which later
led to audio coding. It is worthwhile to note that
what best benefit the business from a viewpoint
of profit were peripheral technologies, not the
core technology in speech coding as follows.
Telecommunication systems in the late 1970s
and the early 1980s were implemented by discrete
adders and multipliers, or multiple SSIs
(small scale integration)/MSIs (medium scale
integration) which are single-chip integrations
thereof. An FIR (finite impulse response) filter
performs prediction which is one of the basic
functions in ADPCM. An FIR filter has a structure
to repeat a multiply accumulate (MAC) operation
which is a multiplication followed by accumulation.
An NEC engineer noticed this structure
which led to a programmable digital signal processor
(DSP) chip dedicated to efficient calculation
of a series of MAC operations. It was the
birth a DSP19-21. This DSP has an on-chip MAC
processor which enables data load, multiplication,
accumulation, and storage within a single
instruction cycle. The DSP was a useful tool for
its programmability (i.e., software control capability)
in the standardization process where the
algorithm develops day by day and frequent
code modification is essential.
The MAC operation is one of the most common
basic operations in signal processing often
used in time-frequency transforms such as the
Fourier transform, not to mention FIR filtering.
For this reason, DSPs, which efficiently perform
MAC operations and provide programmability,
are recognized to this day as one of the most
indispensable components for implementing a
104
variety of multimedia terminals represented by
smartphones. It is also widely known that Texas
Instruments (TI) achieved the remarkable
growth by focusing on the DSP business since
the early 1990s. On the contrary, NEC did not
benefit as much as expected. In CCITT standardization,
which is one decade before MPEG standardization,
there was an agreement that the
mandatory-patent holders would not claim their
rights for royalty. There was no profit from royalty,
nor other business success from the core
technology. On another front, NEC developed
the world's first DSP, put it in the market with
subsequent models, successfully established a
new business division, and achieved some firstmover
advantage.
As DSPs develop to undertake more complex
processing, code writing (coding) became
a headache for engineers. DSPs operate
accordingtoacode writtenin anassembly
language, a primitive language specific to the
chip, instead of a high-level language such as
Fortran and the C language. An experienced
engineer who is fluent in the assembly language
was required to write a code for a DSP.
However, it was not possible for engineers in
those days to understand how important it is
to support coding. Coding with an assembly
language dedicated to a specific chip was simply
equivalent to that with a high-level language
for those engineers.
As a result, when the DSP processing capability
rapidly developed and coding became more
complicated, NEC engineers did not request sufficient
investment in coding-support technology,
or equivalently, code compilers. The investment
priority was given to chip development rather
than development of a good code-compiler
which translates a code in a high-level programming
language into the assembly code to support
coding. This is how NEC rapidly lost its
presence in the DSP business. NEC made a large
investment for changing the game in the 2000s,
when dissemination of 3G mobile phones took
place, to develop a new chip with groundbreaking
computational power and small power consumption.
Nevertheless, it was not possible to
get a big market share, but only to contribute to
its own mobile-phone products. A miracle never
happened.
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May/June 2021

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