Difference between revisions of "Exploitation Plan"

Revision as of 14:52, 21 August 2013

This document details the areas in academia and industry to which this project is naturally aligned and how the exploitation in these areas will benefit project members and the wider UK reputation and economy in such.

The Embedded Hardware and Software Market

The value chain for embedded software and hardware starts with human capital. In the UK, this is predominantly derived through university education. This project will generate positive academic and publicity results for UoB. They will in effect attract an increasing number of young software and hardware engineers to the discipline. As we will become world-leaders in energy-efficient compilation, UoB will gain a unique selling point.

In the commercial sector, the wide range of embedded products involve the combination of intricate hardware design with an increasingly large software stack to add functionality. Thus ALL hardware products require efficient compilation. The reality of this is that the majority of engineering effort now resides in software design, and an effective compilation chain can improve the time-to-market and efficiency of final products.

This project thus provides a feed-in at a fundamental level to all electronic systems designs and any products made as an aggregation of smaller systems (the mobile telephone is a good example of this).

Size of the Market

As well as the direct compiler market – businesses working on compilers, there are the industries further up in the value chain, who are additionally supported by this work. These are the silicon chip and silicon IP industries and then at the top is the global electronics industry.

There are no published figures for the size of the compiler market. However we can see the activity in one part of the market, the open source sector, because its activity is public.

During the time span 1 January 2012 through 31 October 2012, 459 individuals contributed to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) project. Of these, 197 made 10 or more contributions, and so may be regarded as active contributors. Most of those are professional compiler developers, either working in Universities or in industry.

Whilst GCC is the most widely used open source compiler, we are aware that the LLVM project has a similar level of activity (as can be seen from the attendance at their respective conferences). We also know that Microsoft Visual C is the world’s most popular compiler, and that there are many other niche proprietary compilers developed by companies like Intel and ACE Technologies. It is thus reasonable to suggest that GCC represents 20% of the professional compiler activity worldwide.

Compiler engineering is specialist and well paid. The total cost of employing a high grade engineer in industry is typically around $US500,000 per year, while in Universities, the figure is lower. We take a $US250,000 as an average.

This indicates the total amount spent directly on compiler development is around $US250 million or £150 million. As a sanity check we instead took $US150,000 as an average salary and used the ONS/BIS multiplier of 1.82 to determine the economic activity. This provides a figure of £170 million, and we want more of that business to be in the UK.Compilers are a critical part of the value chain supporting any processor chip or silicon IP company.

This is an area where the UK excels. Some of the world's largest chip companies have major R&D facilities in the UK, for example ST Microelectronics and Infineon in Bristol. In Silicon IP, the UK leads the world. The largest supplier is ARM in Cambridge (market cap £9.5 billion), while Imagination Technologies (market cap £1.2 billion) is third. Both ARM and Imagination are companies which illustrate the UK’s strength in this sector. They have grown strongly for the past decade as the following graph of their market capitalisation shows.

It is worth noting that, while ARM are now known for low-power processor designs, their original differentiation in the market, was as the first chip design to be supplied with a comprehensive software development suite (RealView) including compiler, debugger and IDE. Quantifying the size and trends of the embedded market is notoriously difficult as has been noted within the TSB itself.

Compilers are always developed in close cooperation with the chip designers. So strength in UK compiler technology will help to support a strong UK silicon chip and silicon IP industry.

And at the top of the value chain is the global electronics industry worth around $US1 trillion (Consumer Electronics Association, 2012). ARM's quarterly report in July 2012, announced they were supplying 2 billion designs per quarter. Other UK silicon design companies like CSR and Imagination have similar success in supplying the electronics market.That success relies not just on the excellence of the silicon designs, but of the infrastructure supporting them, of which the compiler is a key component. As a result, any improvements made in compiler optimisation through this project are exploitable and are of value to all members of this value chain.

The Case for Open Source Software Business and Research Methods

Open source software is everywhere. Your smartphone probably runs Android, when you browse the web you quite likely use Firefox to look at websites, most of which are running Apache.

Open source is also big business for both customers and suppliers. Google and Facebook's huge data centres are built with open source software. Red Hat is a US corporation worth nearly $5Bn, MySQL was sold for $1Bn, and IBM the world's largest patent holder makes more from open source software than it does from patents.

Open source software is free, both in the sense of not paying for it, and in the sense of freedom to use it how you wish. But as the corporate examples given above illustrate, there is still plenty of opportunity to make money.

Embecosm uses a service business model. Although the software we work on is open source (GCC, LLVM, Verilator, etc), it is immensely complex, and requires adaptation for different computer hardware. For most companies it is more cost effective to use our specialist skills in via sub-contract, even though, being open source they could develop the software in house.

This same business model is used by IBM's open source business unit. Since its founding in 2008, Embecosm has on average more than doubled its revenue each year, and expansion plans for the company will sustain this over the medium term.

Progress So Far

This project explicitly utilises open source processes to maximise the impact of this work. Our plan is to make the wider community aware of this project and its outputs early on, creating engagement from new stakeholders, we aim to create a follow-on community who takes the techniques forward without the need for further financial support. To further increase awareness of such technology and in keeping with standard academic practices, a number of peer-reviewed academic papers will be published, demonstrating the feats achieved through this project. University of Bristol will lead efforts for their creation.

Update 28 Aug 2013: BEEBS, mageec.org, IRC/ML, GNU Cauldron, Paper

Such approaches to research have already been proven in this field. In a precursor project with the same partners, we had much success with this approach and successfully engaged the GCC and LLVM compiler communities.

As an open source project, both University of Bristol and Embecosm will benefit in terms of an increased reputation in this ever-important field. For Embecosm, the project will establish a reputation as the leading experts in energy efficient optimisation. The boost to reputation will allow Embecosm (and the UK generally) to be seen as the location where low energy compiler technology is to be found. This will generate new customers and business opportunities for Embecosm around the world. UoB is already widely recognised for its work on low power electronic system design. Its reputation will be greatly enhanced by its participation in this project, strengthening links to industry in this field and providing a feed through to teaching and new research opportunities.

Update 28 Aug 2013: Moon and Ashley, Wuthering Bytes, Customer Presentation and discussions. New customer contacts established after TSB EEC presentation in July

Plan Going Forward

• Wuthering Bytes (academic dissemination)
• Final Paper Submissions (A)
• Increased BEEBS (both)
• Program of Targetted Customer Engagement (note this is much later in the project, Q3-Q6)
• Conference Presentations (tbd, both industrial and academic)
• Ongoing blog posts, public ML (E)
• Embecosm recruitment (later quarters)
• More students at Bristol
• Bristol student projects
• {academic exploitation plan}