Value Chain Producer Model for Improved Asic Design and Delivery

Value Chain Producer Model for Improved Asic Design and Delivery

As product cycles continue to shrink tighter and tighter, chip houses are forced to emphasize industry-established Intellectual Property (IP) blocks and subsystems in their system-on-chip (SoC) designs to construct their products. Before, a large number of sizable vertically integrated chip outfits utilized their own internal capabilities to generate all of their designs from internally developed IP building blocks with largely customized design. Similar to what is happening in other industries, in house development of a product from scratch requires too much time and money to make the product competitive in the marketplace. Leveraging basic building blocks enhanced by the key outsourced differentiating pieces is now business as usual in the chip industry. 

IP suppliers such as ARM® have emerged to help chip design firms gain access to hard IP building blocks and reduce their design cycles. Productivity and the competitiveness of small chip designing firms have increased as a result of this approach.

Achieving first-silicon-success is more important then ever thanks to increased demands for a reduction in design cycle time. As design requirements get more complicated and the problems grows swiftly, the company owning the best-fit IP blocks will come out on top. The availability of standard IP blocks has rendered creating custom designs from the ground up uneconomical.

Traditional ASIC (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) firms face the problems of being limited to a specific set of IP and hence suffer from a dearth of choices. Furthermore, the integration process is becoming a key challenge. Integrating a diverse group of building blocks from various suppliers to produce a working product is difficult. So, the Value Chain Producer (VCP) model become in vogue with firms providing extensive support for building blocks that satisfy the stringent specifications, integration, productization and manufacturing proficiency, alongside made-to-order design capabilities.

Exceptional expertize with access to differentiating IP, allow the VCP's to work with the customer to find the best IP blocks as well as successfully incorporate multiple IP blocks from various IP manufacturers on a single chip. The same expertise and knowledge has crossed over into the way the package is selected. As faster and denser designs push performance and power to the limits, the relationship between IP and package design plays a more important part. Due to their deep understanding of IP performance and package characteristics, experienced VCP's can devise an optimal solution.

A versatile global process involving numerous providers of design tools, equipment, IP, packaging, manufacturing, assembly and testing activities, is needed to quickly generate a top-notch product that is fair priced and functional. The main purpose of the semiconductor VCP outfits is to facilitate and perfect this elaborate value chain by combining the services and solutions provided by numerous suppliers and delivering production-quality semiconductor chips at decreased cost, reduced risk, and greater operational flexibility. As a consequence, the VCP model provides a streamlined and cost-saving process for current System Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and fabless semiconductor companies (FSCs) to successfully launch products into the marketplace.

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As an experienced chip industry consultant, Milan Leeham has been involved in many ASIC productization and manufacturing projects. He highly recommends a VCP ASIC design services company such as eSilicon when doing ASIC mixed signal or other complex system on chip design projects.