Firms like e-Silicon and its brethren are looking to ease the pain of ASIC and SoC manufacture by offering a complete end-to-end service. This Sunnyvale-based start-up has already been the recipient of considerable media attention, making it into the Red Hearing 100 Best US Private Companies last year. After receiving the customers' netlist requirements, it takes care of manufacture, packaging and testing, while giving guaranteed yield levels. In addition, it can deal with the signal-integrity, crosstalk and power-consumption worries that may arise.
Star of India
Wipro has placed itself at the vanguard of technological advance upon the Indian subcontinent. The company has become a leading propend in all manner of outsourcing. Among its clientele you will find the likes of SunMicrosystems, National Grid, Cypress Semiconductor, Toshiba, Epson, Cisco, Compaq, Alcatel, and Lucent. Its SoC Design Centre has been set up to facilitate quicker chip development with its product-ready SoC architecture platform, SoC-Raptor, which provides early-to-market, high-performance devices with a strong chance of first-time silicon success. It has already been involved in more than 40 SoC/ASIC tape-outs ranging from 0.25 to 0.13µm technology, and is a licensed third-party ARM vendor.Accent stands out as this sector's Mediterranean connection. Its «Highway to Silicon" solution (first featured in EPN last summer) makes use of partnerships with leading firms in EDA (namely Cadence) and semiconductor manufacture (STMicro). The company can thus offer customers an easier and less costly entry point into chip design and production, thus presenting companies with a less bumpy ride into manufacture. The Milan-based enterprise can even go one stage further by offering full project management services, including risk identification and assessment, consulting, and supply-chain assistance.
The "Big Easy"
Open Silicon provides an end-to-end custom ASIC solution via its OpenModel offering, which combines extensive design and product engineering expertise with customer-driven supply-chain implementation, to help clients make informed choices that lower cost and reduce danger at each step of the implementation process. This procedure begins with a systematic cost analysis that optimises expenditures across the supply chain. Customers can then choose from a broad portfolio of qualified semiconductor intellectual property. Much like Accent, the firm makes use of some powerful friends. It has partnered with the foundry TSMC and IP vendors like Rambus and Mosys, as well as with EDA suppliers like Synopsis and Magma.
"Super, Smashing, Great"
This all sounds like a good thing surely, so what are you going to find at fault, Mike? Well, my only concern is this: are such firms making it all too simple? By removing the last remaining barriers that might stop companies from stepping into the fray, and affording them the means to get their hands on their own chips without any serious exertion on their part, is it just encouraging the appearance of chancers looking to exploit new opportunities? The low level of upfront investment and the short time scales involved mean that these solutions provide companies with a route to manufacture without the need for any serious commitment. It could be argued that this is just likely to result in many more «me too" products flooding the market, and further assert the proliferation of indistinct «techno bling". I personally don't want to see any Tom, Dick are Harry, who can leave the business just as quickly as they came in, supplying the High Street shopper with yet more throw-away merchandise. This just tends to drain the value out of technology, and leads to a glut of gadgetry that has no way to differentiate itself from everything else. The requirement of initial outlay implies that companies have to show a level of obligation to their customer base, and to some extent guards against such occurrences taking place. Surely this just acts to widen the disjunction between the marketing or promotion of a product and the technical expertise needed to create it in the first place. Making things easy is fine, but if it's too easy, then who really benefits in the long term? Perhaps the consequence will be that the consumer-electronics industry will just become more unstable, helpless flitting between different emerging areas, and trying to jump on the next bandwagon that comes along.
