Let me give you my excuse for taking time away from paying the mortgage today. I have several reasons for this post. First off, there was a great response with several readers taking the time to comment on my first post three weeks ago on the EE Times Blog page. I know Seinfeld created a wildly successful sitcom on the premise, but I am surprised by the fact that an article about nothing attracted many kind user comments while the first two “real” articles did not attract so much as a quick flame or two. The difference was that I posted here to announce Dew Point. This post is partially an experiment to see if readers of the semiconDr blog look here first and follow the link to EE Times. If that was true for the introductory post, please hit this link and comment on the future of the fabless model:
Real men have fabs…or do they?
UPDATE: Actually, I just checked and someone has finally pointed out that I disproved my own thesis by comparing fabless semicos to auto makers. I knew I left that paragraph in there for a reason!
The second reason for another post to link to Dew Point was to use a picture from my old friend, Glenn Sundeen, known as TigerPal in flickr. For the earlier post, I grabbed an image from a photographer unknown to me. Since then, Glenn was gracious enough to post several excellent Dew Point theme images. Check out the other images on TigerPal’s photostream. Back in the old days, I think I was the one that showed Glenn how to load film into his camera. But the digital revolution has been kind to him, and this is obvious in his photography. From his home base in Korea, he travels Asia and the world sharing much of his work online. For other expats of the Canadian Prairie, there are some recent posts showing the beauty of the those places we both left behind.
The final reason for this post is that I was just listening to a panel discussion from the EE Times System-on-chip 2.0 Virtual Conference. Dylan McGrath, online editor at EE Times, hosted an interesting panel discussion -- IP and IP Selection that fit well with my Dew Point article this week. I think it was the Cadence presenter, Steve Leibson, who suggested a future maturing of the circuit IP business that would look like the iTunes store. With an ‘i’ in front, Cadence may need to check Apple’s trademarks before they launch the IP Store. Actually, as Apple delves deeper into chip development, this may have been their plan all along.
New iStores aside, Leibson mentioned something more directly applied to my article about the fabless chip business. He compared current SoC development to the board-level design of the early eighties. Today’s engineers buy IP and place it rather than ICs to populate a board. That’s interesting because I think it will be the same people one day buying IP – OEM system designers – and making their own chips. That doesn’t leave much room for fabless semiconductor manufacturers.
