The Ever-Changing ASIC Business

By SemiWiki

September 4, 2018

The cell-based ASIC business that we know today was born in the early 1980s and was pioneered by companies like LSI Logic and VLSI Technology. Some of this history is covered in Chapter 2 of our book, “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”. The ASIC business truly changed the world. Prior to this revolution, custom chips were only available to huge, integrated device manufacturers. These behemoth organizations housed massive design teams, mask-making equipment and wafer fabs. They did it all.

Once ASICs began to flourish, all of that changed. The custom chip market became democratized. Suddenly, anyone with a vision and a reasonable budget could build a custom chip. The result was the ubiquitous deployment of semiconductor technology for custom applications of all kinds. Products became smaller, smarter and more sophisticated. We continue to see this trend today. In spite of this dramatic impact, ASIC has become something of a boutique market. In the 1980s and 1990s many analysts tracked market size, growth, and weighed competing technologies to implement custom chips. Today, hardly anyone tracks this business in spite of its revolutionary impact on our world. I did find a Gartner reference that predicts the ASIC market will be about $27B by 2020 which I think is conservative. AI and other heavy duty applications running on specialized ASICs dominate general purpose silicon so be optimistic, absolutely.

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