Evolving Trends in the High Tech Industry

By: Naor Mazza Reshef

In this article the new trends in high tech industry focusing on hardware development will be analyzed using the google insight for search tool. This tool enables to measure seach volume of phrases according to geographic area, changes over the time and corlation with news and events.

The highh tech industry has twomajor fields: software and hardware. The hardware industry focus mainly in Structured ASIC* design or VISI design.

Exploring the georaphical segmentation of these search phrases, the order will be like that: India on the head with the largest search volume and than other countries like the United States, Australia and China.

This shows clearly that most of the asic development moves especially toIndia and far east. There is search volume in china too.

It seems that the trend of moving design centers of largewestern high - tech companies is clear. Especially the trend of moving design centers to India.

Lately the seach volume ofrelated phrases to the above phrases are increasing. This shows getting out of the depression and increase in the activity in the field.

We can conclude thatnowdays India is therising power in the field, while we can see increase in china too. The process of moving the design centers lower the costs to the large companies and probably will go on in the near future.It seems that when the languge barrieris beingcrossed,an increase inChinawill benoticed too.

The costs of a developer (software or hardware engineer) in the far east is much lower than in the west so it seems that the process will continue.

Structured ASIC

*An application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) is an integrated circuit (IC) customized for a particular use, rather than intended for general-purpose use. For example, a chip designed solely to run a cell phone is an ASIC. Intermediate between ASICs and industry standard integrated circuits, like the 7400 or the 4000 series, are application specific standard products (ASSPs).

Structured ASIC design (also referred to as platform ASIC design) has different meanings in different contexts. This is a relatively new term in the industry, which is why there is some variation in its definition. However, the basic premise of a structured/platform ASIC is that both manufacturing cycle time and design cycle time are reduced compared to cell-based ASIC by virtue of there being pre-defined metal layers (thus reducing manufacturing time) and pre-characterization of what is on the silicon (thus reducing design cycle time). One definition states that:

In a "structured ASIC" design, the logic mask-layers of a device are predefined by the ASIC vendor (or in some cases by a third party). Design differentiation and customization is achieved by creating custom metal layers that create custom connections between predefined lower-layer logic elements. "Structured ASIC" technology is seen as bridging the gap between field-programmable gate arrays and "standard-cell" ASIC designs. Because only a small number of chip layers must be custom-produced, "structured ASIC" designs have much smaller non-recurring expenditures (NRE) than "standard-cell" or "full-custom" chips, which require that a full mask set be produced for every design.

This is effectively the same definition as a gate array.

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