The ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuit) Market

ASIC’s must be designed for a specific end product. These design and manufacturing costs have risen rapidly over the years as the geometry of semiconductors has gone from the millimeter to the nanometer level. The semiconductor manufacturing machines must be set for each ASIC, referred to as non-recurring engineering costs. Any bugs discovered after manufacturing an ASIC must be fixed with much slower software or the ASIC must be completely re-manufactured.

Since the complexity of designing an ASIC has increased dramatically many companies have outsourced ASIC design to third party firms which complicates IP ownership and potentially involves outsourcing what should be a core competency. As complexity, cost, and time to market has increased companies are looking to alternatives when building their digital products.

PLD’s are designed and manufactured once. Customers then write the software that these PLD’s will use. Generic or one time programmable processors are similar standardized IC that the customer uses to process the software it has written. By using a simpler PLD or generic processor it eases a company’s ability to in-source all of a product’s design while shrinking the time spent on product design and testing.

Clearly there is a tradeoff between speed (time to market), performance, and flexibility. The Cost-benefit of high-end PLD chips improves as small-geometry processes bring costs down while complexity of submicron designs increases cost of developing ASIC chips. The number of new ASIC starts has decreased from 12,000 in 1995 to 2,000 in 2002 and may not exceed 1,000 in 2008.

• ASICs, typically require weeks to develop, plus have large up-front engineering costs
  • It can take a year to design an ASIC, plus more time to design into end equipment
• PLD’s allow designers to adapt to changes in design throughout overall design process (from prototyping to production)
  • An engineer can design and program a high-density PLD in a matter of hours
  • Bugs and glitches can be fixed during early production
  • Features and functionality can be added while the product is deployed in the field
• The ASIC market has far fewer design starts, but the ASIC designers typically have much larger budgets

The advantages of FPGAs over ASICs and ASSPs are design and product flexibility allowing users to reduce a products’ time to market and avoid high up-front cost of developing custom solutions. The disadvantages of FPGAs are higher unit costs than custom solutions and they also use more energy affecting battery life.

One of the next big growth markets for semiconductors is in the SoC / embedded market. On what devices will the next group of innovators and inventors build their products? Xilinx and Altera (along with one-time programmable processor maker Microchip) have the early edge; with the industries goliaths Intel, IBM, and TI currently offering less flexible products and development platforms. Who the semiconductor intellectual property vendors and end-product innovators embrace will determine which platform overtakes the shrinking market for product specific semiconductor devices (aka ASICs, ASSPs, etc).