This press release is copyrighted by The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE). Its use is granted only to journalists and news media. Embargo date: 26 February 2002, 5:00 p.m. ET.
Business is definitely not "as usual" for fabless semiconductor companies these days. For one thing, shrinking circuit features and rising transistor density have spawned the astonishing system on a chip (SoC), in which most or all of the circuitry required for, say, a cell phone fits on a single IC. Until a few years ago, these SoCs contained mostly digital circuits. But today, the growing demand for communications ICs requires that SoCs also contain analog, RF, and mixed-signal components.
Since most of these communications SoCs are used in consumer products that have short market windows, design houses have precious little time to construct these ICs from scratch. So, more and more often, IC designs are being built out of blocks of so-called intellectual property (IP), or pre-existing components such as digital signal processors, oscillators, and A/D converters. The voracious appetite for these pre-designed blocks has given rise to the IP provider, a new breed of business that specializes in designing IP and licensing it to the IC design houses.
In this article in the March issue of IEEE Spectrum, authors Peter L. Levin and Reinhold Ludwig consider the impact of three disruptive changes on fabless semiconductor and electronic design automation companies that supply the design tools. One change is the growing intricacy of SoC applications, especially those with large blocks of analog and RF components. Another is the need for fabless semiconductor companies to develop business models for sending IP-based designs to foundries or contract manufacturers. A third essential is the development of new design tools and procedures that allow SoC designers to create and widely reuse intellectual property. Taken together, the answers to thse needs will mold how SoC innovations will be captured and exploited in very large-scale circuitry.
Contact: Linda Geppert, 212 419 7562, [email protected].For faxed copies of the complete article ("Crossroads for Mixed-Signal Chips" by Peter L. Levin and Reinhold Ludwig, Techno Venture Management, IEEE Spectrum, March 2002, pp. 38-43) or to arrange an interview, contact: Nancy T. Hantman, 212 419 7561, [email protected].
###
RSS