Remember when a camera was a camera, a phone was just a phone and your CD player only played CDs? Those days are gone: now PDAs can be MP3 players, still cameras record audio and video, mobile phones think they're cameras and... the list goes on and on. That's "convergence", and it is having a profound effect on the industries that make the chips that perform all these multiple functions.

ABI Research is releasing a new study of the ICs used in consumer electronics devices. "Worldwide Broadband CPE and Consumer Electronics ICs" provides an analysis of the key CPE and CE products that will drive IC demand, as well as a detailed view of the key IC product categories that will be the enablers of many emerging digital consumer products.

"Our feeling is that we're on the verge of a structural change within this industry," says ABI Research analyst James Patrick Seifert. "Our research indicates that the convergence of key functionalities, coupled with increasing performance and design productivity, is driving steeply falling system-level costs. This in turn is enabling solutions that allow $200 digital cameras and $35 DVD players to come to market. The greatest innovation is in the portable and mobile device sectors."

Reference designs are an important element in this process, particularly with so-called "system-on-a-chip" ICs. For equipment vendors, reference designs simplify the multiplying business and technical issues that come with multi-function devices. Texas Instruments and Broadcom have been proponents of reference designs for some time, and they have now been joined by Intel.

Their increasing use, concludes Seifert, levels the playing field, allowing smaller equipment manufacturers to bring new products to market quickly. At the same time, reference designs allow IC vendors to offer a standard solution across multiple equipment manufacturers. "Product life cycles," he says, "are catching up to the product usage cycles, in turn putting pressures on the vendor RoI."

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