ASIC Design Starts: Recovery in the Markets

The ASIC Design Start landscape has changed in the last three or four years starting with 2006 and continuing through today.  The market landscape has changed to accommodate increasing design costs, rising design complexity and lengthening design cycle times, especially in the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) market. These changes are having an impact on the ASIC Design Start market as the broader semiconductor market is recovering from the financial meltdown that occurred in the 3rd quarter of 2008 and into the first part of 2009.

Semico Research Corp has looked at these impacts from the point of view of the ASIC Design Start market and encapsulated these changes and trends in a new report titled; ASIC Design Starts: Recovery in the Markets, SC105-10, August 2010. This report looks at changes and trends in 71 end applications summarized in the Computer, Consumer, Communications, Transportation and Industrial market categories. The report tracks the design starts and unit shipments of nine different types of ASIC products; Analog, Mixed Signal, Gate Array, Advanced Performance Multicore SoCs, Value Multicore SoCs, Basic SoCs, PLDs, FPGAs and Structured ASICs used in the profiled applications.

Forecasts for ASIC design starts and ASIC unit shipments from 2010 through 2014, using 2009 as the base year are given. The report also looks at design complexity, gate count, starts by process geometry, regional design starts with forecasts for design starts in each area. Some of the data discussed in 89 pages with 60 tables and 65 graphs are:

• Total ASIC design starts fell 5.2% in 2009, while Semico is forecasting a return to growth with an increase of 9.1% in 2010.
• Total ASIC design starts are forecast to show a CAGR of 7.6% from 2010 – 2014.
• The number of ‘first time’ designs in the SoC market dropped 16.6% in 2009 while derivative SoC designs dropped only 7.8%.
• The fastest growing category of silicon solution is the Basic SoC at a CAGR of 20.2%.
• The largest end market for ASIC design starts is the Communications market with 39.6% of the total.
• The fastest growing market category is the Transportation segment with a CAGR of 10.7%.

​Perhaps the biggest change in the ASIC design landscape is the evolution on the SoC market from two traditional types of SoCs to now include three SoC types: . Performance SoCs become Advanced Performance Multicore SoCs. Value SoCs become Value Multicore SoCs and a new category of SoC, the Basic SoC is created. These changes reflect the new ways silicon designers are crafting their silicon solutions to meet changing market requirements and increasing design costs. The new definitions reflect the trends towards using multiple CPU cores in the end silicon to increase performance and the extensive use of on-chip Interconnects to tie these CPU cores together. The new Basic SoC category is a reflection of the increasing use of CPU cores from 3rd Party Intellectual Property (SIP) vendors on Micro Controllers that had previously used proprietary CPUs to increase performance and reduce design cycle times.