By Rich Goldman, Director of Marketing, Ansys
What novel thing did Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Google & Amazon all do in 2021? They all designed bespoke silicon, specific to their application to give them each a big competitive advantage. As an added bonus, bespoke silicon reduced the dependency on standard silicon making these companies less vulnerable to the great semiconductor shortage of 2021.
Competitors have noticed, and they are ramping up to make bespoke silicon the driving trend of 2022. But bespoke silicon isn’t as accessible as ASIC was back in the day. Whereas ASIC democratized chip design and enabled many a startup, bespoke silicon is driven by innovative systems companies with specific applications. These systems companies are bringing their systems expertise to IC design. Bespoke chips are much larger, encompassing many more functions, and are driving the second big trend of 2022, 3D-IC.
