Conexant linux driver

Local Silicon Designers Getting into Wi-Fi Gear

I sure hope Bill Carney likes the weather in Taiwan.

No, he's not here in Taipei with me. Not far as I know, anyway. But he gets my congratulations: The Wi-Fi Alliance couldn't easily have picked a better new chairmanif it had to lose Dennis Eatonthan the senior director of strategic marketing and business development at Texas Instruments' Wireless Networking business unit.

But Bill Carney won't be sleeping well if he wanders around the booths here at the Computex show in Taipei, where I've just spent a week.

Last year, all of the Wi-Fi gear here had chips from the big American suppliers: TI, Broadcom, Conexant (formerly Intersil), Agere and so on. But this year, local silicon designers are getting their noses into the trough.

Each system builder I discussed this with said it's very simple, really: It's about access.

"We have to pay $50,000 for the full development system for the American chipmakers," said one candid startup. He's hoping to be able to afford that one day; he has a really neat idea for a voice-over-Wi-Fi system, which should allow him to retire young if he's got it even half right.

But right now, that's pretty much his first year's capital. He has some prototyping to do. He can't finance that out of revenue, because he has no revenueindeed, if he couldn't camp out in his parents' house, he'd have no R&D at all, because he can't drive a taxi to pay the rent and design circuits in his spare time.

The big, established chip designers won't even let him see the programming manual.

Here he is, trying to write a Linux driver for a device he has to support, and for which he has to make some standard mods, and the people who sell the device won't help him.

"So, we are buying our stuff from a local company," he said, "because we can do serious development."

They were often quite shy about saying which local company, but after a little digging, I'm pretty clear that it's "California-based" InProComm that they're working with. I dare say there are and will be others.

Take it from me: The established companies need to erode some of their arrogance. But it's not just arrogance.

Heck, Carney doesn't have to end up working in Taiwan. Several brilliant designers who are paid by the Taiwanese are allowed to stay in Austin, Texashi to Glenn Henry, designer of Centaur's processor chips for VIAand Bill has a support circle of guys in the same state without whom he couldn't do half as good a job as he does.

Next Page: Taking a cue from the history of PCs.

But let's look into the future of wireless. It's not that different from the future of PCs. We saw New York and Boston watch, skeptically, as California created Silicon Valleyand yet, within a decade, all of the technical experts in microcomputer design were West Coast folks.

And then they started building the silicon in the Far East, and suddenly, people with Japanese and Indian and Chinese names started appearing on the boards of big Silicon Valley firms.

I think the reason isn't just as simple as "new guys are always prepared to treat the customers better." Obviously, I think they are treating the customers better, because they have to, no question. If you want to wean a customer off an established market leader, you have to compete in the realm of enthusiasm.

But there's more to it than that. The fact is that if you have a production plant, you can't leave the factory workers to run it. You need highly qualified engineers, and they teach the people around them how to do things. Quickly, their apprentices become competent; the best of them are eager, hungry, energetic and dedicated, and become brilliant.

When the time comes to replace your original factory manager, who are you going to pick? Some American or European PhD with a huge benefits package and expectations, who doesn't speak Chinese? Or the undervalued genius who actually knows how the factory works, knows the staff and has been personally responsible for at least half of the brilliant ideas his boss has been claiming credit for during the previous five years?

Well, sometimes you'll hire the expensive figurehead, and sometimes the local kid will get the job; and after that, it's up to the laws of evolution. My pick: The PC designers of the year 2025 all will be people who are currently studying hard in Chinese universities.

So, if Bill doesn't have to move to Taiwan, there's probably a simple reason why. It'll be because Taiwan has started outsourcing its production to mainland China, the same way California exported it to Taiwan.

And for another five years, I bet all of the senior managers sent into rural mainland China from Taipei headquarter offices will be Taiwanese. But after that, if you and I want to design wireless gear, our future is in a tower block in Beijing.

Well, that's Bill's future, no doubt. He's an engineer, and they'll want to employ him even if he doesn't speak Mandarin. Me: I'd better start studying ...

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