Industry Expert Blogs

Very few people realize that the semiconductor IP (SIP) market has already far surpassed $1B in yearly revenue, as SIP products typically support the industry's most interesting press headlines rather than make their own. Despite the economic turmoil of the past two years, SIP company returns have often outperformed the industry as a whole, with some company share prices now in record territory. The SIP market size, growth, and future prospects are driven by the very simple but powerful value proposition of enabling the delivery of more functionality to a product's ultimate end user more quickly and more cost-effectively. Let's trace some of the steps in more detail from start to finish and back again.

Shrinking manufacturing geometries and the resulting increase in integration have set the direction of the semiconductor industry from the very beginning. As the system-on-chip (SoC) began to appear, the corresponding building-block paradigm made the SIP business model viable. More customers of the same SIP building block with more aggregate volume allows more investment in functionality. The availability of production-proven SIP building blocks acts to reduce SoC complexity and speeds time-to-market. Design reuse enabled by the SIP business is just a small but 'recent' example of a much larger outsourcing megatrend.

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