Buyers can expect more standard-cell ASICs
By Staff -- Purchasing, 12/22/2000 2:00:00 AM
The worldwide market for application-specific integrated circuits will double from $15.5 billion to $32.8 billion in 2004 driven by the computer, consumer electronics and communications industries.
While ASICs includes seven types of products, it is dominated by standard cell, programmable logic devices and gate arrays. Of the $15.5 billion total ASIC market in 1999, those three products accounted for $12.4 billion, according to market researcher IC Insights. In fact, standard cell and PLDs will have the greatest growth and gate arrays will decline. Standard cell and PLDs grew in excess of 30% in 1999, but gate arrays declined 19%.
In coming years the growth rate will be strong for standard cell parts as that market segment grows from $7.3 billion in 1999 to about $21 billion in 2004. At the same time gate arrays will decline from $2.4 billion to about $1 billion while PLDs will increase from $2.8 billion to $7 billion, the market researcher says.
While the ASIC market will grow, prices will also increase, although the price per gate and per transistor will drop, says Bill McClean, president of IC Insights. For standard cell, prices per gate are expected to decline by about 30% per year between now and 2004. PLDs will decline about 33% and gate arrays will drop 17%.
The bad news is that the actual price for ASICs will increase because the number of transistors and gates increases faster than the price per function declines, says McClean. So while buyers will get more functionality per chip and a better value, the price tag will be higher. The average price of a standard-cell ASIC will rise form about $8.36 in 1999 to $9.97 in 2004; PLD tags will rise from $6.95 to $8.36 and the gate-array average price will increase from $5.68 to 5.97.
Gate array tags will rise the least because it is a declining market. Gate arrays are being squeezed out at the high end by standard cell, which is used in system-on-a-chip solutions and at the low end by programmable logic devices. System-on-a-chip (SOC) standard-cell market is forecast to represent 84% of the total cell based market in 2004. System-on-a-chip contains more than 100,000 gates, a microprocessor or a DSP, memory and application-specific intellectual property.
The future for gate arrays is not promising because of a lack of advanced technology being developed. The last three generations of LSI Logic's ASIC technologies were developed targeting standard-cell designs not gate arrays, says McClean. About two years ago, Texas Instruments got out of the gate-array market with is TimeCell ASIC architecture which embeds gate-array circuitry on a standard-cell device.
The need for more integration and higher performance in electronic equipment is driving the use of standard-cell ASIC technology, according to Sudir Mallya, senior manager of NEC Technologies.
He says consumer electronics, computer and networking equipment, major users of ASICs, have technical needs for high integration, high performance and more intellectual property on a chip, which standard-cell devices can deliver.
"With standard cell you also have much more flexibility and you get much more performance out of your silicon," he says. "With standard-cell technology the user can specify which functions are needed such as memory, analog or logic. Mask layers are customized for the end user."
Standard cell is customized for easy design so cost is lower although there is a higher initial non-recurring engineering (NRE) charge. Long-term standard cells are a more cost-effective ASIC solution because of the integration and higher performance they provide.
While gate arrays are declining, Mallya says there should continue to be a market for them for years. "Gate arrays are used across the board. They are often used as companion chips to standard cells," he says.
Mallya adds that the need for higher bandwidth, higher performance and more integration will continue to drive ASIC technology. He also expects packaging to become a much bigger issue.
Equipment manufacturers need high pincount flip-chip ball grid array (BGA) "so we see the majority of networking designs are in the 1,000-2,000 pincount flip-chip BGA.
"In networking, they want to see more data more quickly in and out of the chip," says Mallya. "They need as many pins as they can get. In fact with many designs, the biggest bottleneck is the number of pins in the design rather than how much functionality they can put in there," he says.
The trend toward more integration will continue. "We are seeing more functionality being put on the silicon rather than other parts of the software, so the systems themselves are becoming more complicated, especially the networking market," he says.
Power management is also becoming a more important issue because of the growth of battery-operated portable equipment such as cell phones and handheld computers.
"On one hand you have a need for a high amount of integration and reasonable performance on silicon because you need to do a lot of processing," says Mallya. "On the other hand you have a very critical battery-life feature. It is going to be a tough problem to manage power dissipation of your designs," he says.
"One area we are focusing on is offering what is called the UX type of process, says Mallya. "The idea is to have a higher-performing and lower-power version of that transistor available on the same piece of silicon. It enables you to use the high performance in the section where you need it. For a cell phone, if you need to run a digital signal processor you can use the high-performance section. If you are running in lower performance sections where you not running it that fast, you can use low power. That enables you to manage your power," he says.
Because of the growth in complexity and technical requirements of ASICs, there may be fewer suppliers. "There are really difficult requirements for manufacturing ASICS," says Mallya. "Achieving multimillion gate designs on a chip, having very high pincount packaging is difficult. We have seen fewer ASIC vendors who are capable of offering the technologies that are required."
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