Industry Expert Blogs

Despite the strong consolidation in the semiconductor industry, the Design IP market is going well, very well with YoY growth of 13.1% in 2016, according with the Design IP Report from IPnest. ARM Group of Softbank (previously known as ARM Holding) is again the strong #1 with IP revenues (licenses plus royalties) of $1,647 million and 48.4% market share, followed by Synopsys with about $450 million and 13% share. Imagination technologies is still #3, despite IP revenues for 2016 decreasing by more than 20% and Cadence is #4, while the IP revenues have also decreased in 2016.

IPnest has defined 11 categories and 3 groups, Processor, Physical and Digital IP, ranking IP vendors in these 11 categories. The processor IP group is the largest, with about 60% of revenues from design IP. The group is split into Microprocessor (CPU), Digital Signal Processors (DSP) and Graphic and Image Processors (GPU and ISP) categories. There are strong disparities between these 3 categories as the weight of the CPU category is about 10x the DSP and 5x the GPU/ISP.

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