K,
After your response I see more where you are going with this idea. I certainly agree that the industry is undergoing a major change in how IP is developed and shared. In fact I found a good article on this subject:
How to fit in IP still eludes chip industry
pubs.cmpnet.com
I agree that LSI can be assured of lots of competitors in its promising arenas such as DVD, DCAM, and LAN. But the existence of competition does not mean that these chips will immediately become commoditized. That of course will happen over a period of time, hopefully several years. Because chip design has gotten so complex, I don't think the growing availability and portability of IP is going to make a fundamental change in the life cycle of products. The life cycle has been steadily growing shorter over the past decade and will probably continue to do so, but I don't see an overnight change in how things operate. In fact, there is paragraph from the article that says pretty well what I'm trying to say:
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"Early on, many people thought [reusable IP for chip design] was the vehicle to commoditize the semiconductor industry once again," said Walden C. (Wally) Rhines, president and CEO of Mentor Graphics Corp. in Wilsonville, Ore. "The thinking was that systems companies would work directly with IP providers to design system-level semiconductors and then go directly to foundries for production." But that, he said, "has not really happened."
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What is more important, in my opinion, than fab processing (which I agree is important), is the design methodology of the company, which the article also points out:
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"Many companies have failed once or twice already at generic approaches to creating big buckets of IP for everyone in the company to use," Glaser warned. "The key metric is not how many items are in a reuse library, it's the design cycle times needed to get products into production," he said. "This is just now being learned by many companies."
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I don't mean to sound like the article supports only the points I was trying to make. It talks a lot about the change in the industry, too, and is worth reading, although it is a bit long.
As for LSI's competitive future in any particular market, I am generally not enough in the know to speculate. My investment in LSI is based on the fact that I believe they are going after the right markets and on what I know of their engineering practices and reputation around the industry.
G.P. |
