March 2010

On March 23rd, 2010, the Silicon-On-Insulator Consortium (SOIC) announced a new program geared towards creating an ecosystem for Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) around SOI wafers. The initial members of the IP ecosystem are IBM, ARM, Ltd., and Cadence Design Systems, Inc. additional members include Synopsys, Inc. and Boeing, Corp. The idea behind this announcement is to establish an IP ecosystem to provide the building blocks essential to crafting System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designs and to establish a list of EDA vendors that have tool sets to facilitate these designs on SOI wafers. Currently, the IP is only for IBM’s 45nm SOI foundry process, but will broaden out to include 65nm and 28nm process geometries and presumably other foundries’ processes as well.

The addition of other process geometries and other foundries’ processes will further increase interest in doing designs on SOI wafers. The entire process of having major players in the semiconductor, IP and EDA markets come together to collaborate on developing this ecosystem validates the proposition that SOI can bring greater long term benefits than by just continuing to use bulk CMOS

Summary of Semico Outlook 2010 Presentation by
Alex Shubat, President and CEO, Virage Logic

One of the great stories of the early 21st Century in the semiconductor industry is the rise of the 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) market and the vendors that populate it. This market has been created and driven in turn by the rise of the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) market and the need to provide higher levels of performance to meet changing market needs while at the same time allowing for increased integration of functions. All this has been against a backdrop of continuing technological evolution towards smaller process geometries and customer expectations of ever-lower silicon price points.

The over-riding reason behind all of these separate trends has been the disaggregation of the semiconductor industry starting all the way back in the 1970’s when semiconductor companies decided they could no longer build their own silicon production equipment. The trend continued with the creation of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) companies and tool sets and evolved further with the rise of independent silicon foundries and now with the rise of the 3rd Party SIP industry. At each juncture, as what had been ‘traditional’ semiconductor manufacturer functions were outsourced, the semiconductor market has itself grown in revenues, unit volumes and impact on the daily lives of people around the world.