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Microelectronics is a vibrant industry in the midst of several paradigm shifts: the first one leading suddenly to its deverticalization has been announced in the eighties, but has only started to take momentum in the late nineties. The semiconductor industry serves a fundamentally growing and pervasive market hovering over $ 200 Billion. It practically controls the OEM market of about $ 1 Trillion (Electronic Appliances and Systems), more or less throughout the current market turmoil.
It is conversely driven by the EDA industry of about $ 3.5 Billion of CAD software solutions, and relies on the microelectronics Design Consulting sector of more than $ 1,8 Billion.
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The first noticeable symptoms of maturing in this thirty year-old industry appeared around 1990 with the emergence of silicon foundries splitting the professional tasks of Integrated Device Makers (IDM) with so-called FabLess suppliers. Such deverticalization at the production level has happened in a similar way to the printing industry in the fifties and to the Computer industry in the sixties. It has lead respectively to the emergence of the publication Editors (as separate from the Printers) and to the emergence and fast growth of the custom and standard software Editors (as opposed to the computer Makers).
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But it happens as a double whammy for the microelectronics industry, since at the same time, deverticalization results from the exploding gap between the capacity for IC design and the capacity for IC fabrication. EDA innovation has proven unable to keep pace for compensating the former capacity, while the latter is pushed by an overwhelming combination of lithographic thinning and of silicon wafer widening...
On top of this double whammy, the semiconductor industry enters periodically into recessions subsequent to its cycles, the ninth in 2001, the tenth in 2005, caused by the rhythmic investment pattern driven by fabrication processes of increasing cost, leading to a reduction in the number of fabrication actors.
As a result "Design Reuse" in the form of readily available ViC "off-the shelf" is the prevalent answer to improve Time-to-Market and facilitate recovery: hence this emerging SIP sector of more than $ 1 Billion, still considered as a subset of EDA, but thoroughly tracked and documented by market analysts because of its tremendous leverage. |
The third paradigm shift now impacting the design industry is the combination of two exponential increases at once:
- that of the minimum number of IC's fabricated at once with an Economic Order Quantity (EOQ) of silicon wafers in the multiples of tens of thousands parts,
- that of the cost of a mask set taxing the Non Recurring Expenditures (NRE) for a new ASIC launch with a $ 1 M (three times that for previous geometries) from 0.13 µm lithography on.
There are two consequences seemingly contradictory and with dramatic impact in the short-term:
- the need to perpetuate mature processes like 0.35 µm and 0.18 µm,
- the need to skip the 0.15 µm process stage while launching at once the 90 nm stage.
All these deep changes coalesce for making the emergence of SIP even more relevant, but even more difficult as well. This small but significant sector of Virtual Components within the Microelectronics Design Industry is quite lively and already segmentable in four categories of actors not to be confused with Custom Design Centers:
- The promoters of a single proprietary architecture or "block-based product opportunities" (ARM, MIPS, then more than 64 contenders for the 32-bit microprocessors...)
- The providers of legacy or standard logic cores, mostly resulting from the absorption of diverse small players or their assets in the typical American way of life creation!
- The pushers of commodity ViC without concern for quality standards
- The providers of "application value-add opportunities"
DOLPHIN is in this fourth category, focusing on a rare competency in mixed signal design, with emphasis on the audio range leading to application domains like music and voice processing, modems and fax transmission, music synthesis, medical devices or industrial sensors, sonars…
While the "Mixed signal SoC Enabler" DOLPHIN paves the way to a new one, as editor of "Technology-centric ViC Platforms", providing differentiated mixed
signal macrocells with their Kits of
Enabling Technologies (generators and virtual application schematics)
to facilitate a hierarchical development process for any complexity of System-on-Chip.
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Commercially, the DOLPHIN strategy is that of a team player focusing to become a "dedicated partner" of the internal SIP Library team of major actors for crucial virtual components differentiated by know-how and patents: ROMet, 80251, hiCOD…
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