IP market to drive chip recovery, says report

IP market to drive chip recovery, says report
By Semiconductor Business News
January 28, 2003 (12:19 p.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030127S0054

PHOENIX--After year's of promises and false starts, the semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) market will finally emerge and play a vital role in driving a recovery in the IC industry, according to a report from Semico Research Corp. here.

Semico forecasts that the SIP market will grow by more than 25% in 2003, with revenues of more than $1 billion. The primary users of SIP will continue to be system-on-chip, ASSPs and FPGA devices, according to Semico analyst Rich Wawrzyniak.

"Companies that create, acquire and reuse SIP have a noticeable advantage over those that do not," said Wawrzyniak.

"A number of issues are impacting the ability of semiconductors to decrease in cost while increasing the performance profile,” he said. “Increasing mask set costs, lengthening design cycle times, shrinking windows of market opportunity, increasing NRE charges and decreasing product life cycles all have a large impact on the future direction the semico nductor market will take."

SIP has emerged as one of the primary vehicles to overcome many of these issues and put the semiconductor industry back on track once again toward increased productivity and profitability.

But still, the full promise of SIP has not been realized. Several problems exist that must be solved before the use of third-party IP can become pervasive.

"The cost of developing reusable SIP is roughly 50% higher than the cost that same SIP would be if it were intended for a single use," said Wawrzyniak. "There is also a lack of a standard to which IP can be built, which can result in interoperability problems between block of IP in complex chip designs."