March 2008

The 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) market has continued to increase its importance to designers for System-on-a-Chip (SoC) through its ability to help reduce the design time and overall costs for these complex silicon solutions.  The growth experienced in 2007 will continue during the next five years as the 2007 -2012 CAGR is forecasted to exceed 18% and the SIP market to surpass $5,500 million in 2012.

One way to segment SIP is into 3rd Party Developed IP and Internally Developed IP.  “When we look at SIP as a function of total silicon costs, 3rd Party Developed IP has decreased dramatically and now represents less than 5% while Internally Developed IP is greater than 25% of silicon costs,” states Rich Wawrzyniak, Senior Analyst at Semico Research.  “To combat some of the Non-Recurring Engineering (NRE) costs associated with SIP, it is likely the market will see IDMs start to license their own internally developed, proprietary SIP to 3rd parties who are not direct customers of their silicon as a means of offsetting these new costs.”

The much anticipated MPU designs from Intel, Silverthorne and Diamondville, have been announced by Intel. The MPU will be marketed under the brand name Atom. The MPU is a single core 80x86. Atom is a new low-power microarchitecture. It represents a new family of processors designed from the ground-up for low-power and performance and is manufactured on 45nm process.

Intel is targeting a different class of processing from its mainstream processors, Core 2 Duo. Atom and its accompanying chipset are relatively lower performance than Core 2 Duo but power consumption is considerably lower as well. Atom is not intended to compete with Core 2 Duo.

You may have heard the term Mobile Internet Device (MID) from Intel. This is not a new market. It is a new marketing term Intel has coined. It encompasses many of the current mobile devices on the market. If it is portable, has wireless communication, computing features and fits in your pocket it is an MID. This would include smart phones, the iphone, Personal Media Players (PMP) with wireless, GPS with internet connectivity, etc. The screen size would be 4.5 in to 6 in. A yet to emerge ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) has a screen size of 5 in to 7 in. Most would run Linux, but are also capable of running Windows. Essentially this is the market for convergence devices we have been discussing for several years. Intel will begin shipping Intel Atom processors soon, with MIDs to start appearing in Q2 2008.