Turning Fixed Costs into Variable Costs: Foundries and Clouds
July 27, 2018
One trend that has been accelerating for a couple of decades is turning fixed costs into variable costs. Often this is what is behind outsourcing some capability. Sometimes it is driven purely by lower variable costs (let's hire a team in Shanghai) or core-competence considerations (we don't really need to run our own cafeteria). However, often it is driven by a desire to switch an inflexible fixed cost for a variable cost. The biggest of these trends in our industry is the foundry/fabless model. Instead of a semiconductor company building their own fab (fixed cost), they buy wafers from foundries (variable costs).
To read the full article, click here
Related Semiconductor IP
- Flexible Pixel Processor Video IP
- Complex Digital Up Converter
- Bluetooth Low Energy 6.0 Digital IP
- Verification IP for Ultra Ethernet (UEC)
- MIPI SWI3S Manager Core IP
Related Blogs
- 3 steps to shrinking your code size, your costs, and your power consumption
- Wafer Costs: Out of Control or Not?
- Why Verification IP Switching Costs Are a Myth
- Do You Really Want Zero Test Costs?
Latest Blogs
- CNNs and Transformers: Decoding the Titans of AI
- How is RISC-V’s open and customizable design changing embedded systems?
- Imagination GPUs now support Vulkan 1.4 and Android 16
- From "What-If" to "What-Is": Cadence IP Validation for Silicon Platform Success
- Accelerating RTL Design with Agentic AI: A Multi-Agent LLM-Driven Approach