Smaller fabless chip vendors face an uphill battle: to beat out larger rivals, they must attract the attention of potential customers, prove the advantages of their products, and demonstrate that they will be reliable, long-term partners. One such company recently used BDTI Benchmarks to accomplish all three of these objectives.
This fabless chip vendor sells chips for wireless infrastructure applications. In these applications, the obstacles for small companies are more challenging than in many other markets, because communications infrastructure equipment companies tend to be conservative in their adoption of new technology. This is understandable, considering the complexity of their products, the associated long design cycles, and their need to support their products in the field for many years.
The chip vendor first licensed the BDTI Communication Benchmark (OFDM)™, an application-level benchmark designed to represent the types of workloads found in communications baseband processing. The vendor’s engineers created an optimized implementation of the benchmark for one of their chips, and then compared their results to results previously published by BDTI. The results showed strong performance and cost-performance for the vendor’s chip.
The vendor then submitted its benchmark implementation to BDTI for certification. In the certification process, BDTI’s engineers performed a detailed technical audit of the benchmark implementation to ensure that it met all of the requirements of BDTI’s detailed specification, enabling credible, apples-to-apples benchmark comparisons. Once certification was complete, BDTI Certified™ benchmark results were published on BDTI’s web site, and made available for the vendor to incorporate into its own sales and marketing materials—including a press release, web site, and customer presentations.
The publicity generated by the release of these benchmark results was impressive, with articles appearing in a variety of electronics industry trade magazines and web sites, and in blogs aimed at the investment community. This publicity enabled the chip vendor to attract the attention of new prospective customers.
Perhaps most importantly, the independently certified benchmark results helped to validate the vendor’s claims regarding the advantages of its chip. This enabled the vendor to overcome skepticism from prospective customers who had previously seen its products.
Finally, for knowledgeable system developers, the fact that this vendor had obtained BDTI Certified benchmark results was a mark of the vendor’s maturity and staying power. Knowledgeable system developers know that BDTI’s certification process is rigorous, and that in order to pass it, the vendor’s product must be solid.
While benchmarks are often thought of as a tool simply for performance comparisons among competitors, this vendor learned first-hand that strong, credible benchmark results can pay off in many other ways—most importantly, winning customers’ business.
Learn how BDTI Benchmarks can help you win new customers by: contacting Jeremy Giddings at BDTI (giddings@BDTI.com).
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