Note: Jeff Lewis is an Executive Advisor who served as Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Artisan Components, one of the early companies developing blocks of intellectual property that’s now part of Arm. His acumen about the IP business is captured in my blog post published on the SEMI website.

Executive Advisor Jeff Lewis held the position of Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for Artisan Components, one of the early companies developing blocks of intellectual property. Lewis, who worked at Artisan from 1996-2000, and his colleagues were members of an elite group who built the mega-successful IP market, estimated today at $7.48 billion. Arm acquired Artisan Components in 2004 for $913 million.

In my role as Executive Director of ESD Alliance and publisher of the quarterly Electronic Design Market Data (EDMD) report that includes IP, I recently talked with Lewis about what he remembers from the early days of IP.

Smith: You were part of the IP revolution. What were the high points and low points that you most remember? 

Lewis: The high point was starting with a relatively blank slate and innovating. Some things worked, some didn’t. We kept trying different things and seeing what would work with plenty of failed tries, successes, and repeats. We got a chance to be on the ground floor of a new industry.

Another high point was watching this nascent industry emerge into a powerhouse. In the ‘90s, EDAC (Electronic Design Automation Consortium, the predecessor to the ESD Alliance) wasn’t interested in tracking IP. As the IP market started growing, EDAC was all over it because it helped pump up the size of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. Suddenly, IP had become a big enough industry that people were starting to care.

Read the rest of The Evolution of the Semiconductor IP Market

Smith: What trends are you seeing in the semiconductor industry. Are there any that surprise you? 

Kibarian: We see several trends that have been going on for quite a while.

As much as we hear Moore’s Law is dead, there’s still a strong drive to get to advanced nodes. The benefits are harder to achieve and require more than geometry scaling, but demand for these advanced nodes continues to grow. Another emerging trend is the need for insatiable compute power in data centers to support the explosion in AI applications. In recent history, the mobile phone market has been the key driver of the push to new advanced nodes, but that is changing as the performance needs of data centers and AI applications are now driving the shift.

Read the rest of PDF Solutions’ John Kibarian on Bringing Semiconductor Manufacturing and Design Closer