Custom Asic market not in decline, claims LSI Logic

EW News 17/03/2004 - Custom Asic market not in decline, claims LSI Logic
Custom Asic market not in decline, claims LSI Logic Richard Wilson
LSI Logic has made a strong rebuttal of claims that the market for full custom Asic devices is in long term decline.
Analysts say the fall in Asic design starts in the past two years marks a terminal decline in the $16bn Asic market.
The claim was repeated by Paul Hollingworth, Altera marketing v-p, at a recent roundtable debate on the battle between Asics and FPGAs.

The cell-based Asic market will simply go away, said Hollingworth.
This is clearly not the case, said Mike Casey, director of strategic marketing at Asic supplier, LSI Logic.
As evidence of the strength of the volume Asic market, we have delivered three separate 10 million gate designs in Europe in the past three months, said Casey.
The number of Asic design starts may have fallen but value of business for big volume Asics has not. New designs with lower cost structured Asics are predicted to double this year.

Mark Croft, European SoC business manager at Mentor Graphics, said the design tool spend on Asic development was not falling.
Investment is stable at around $40,000 per head per year, he said.
FPGA supplier Xilinx believes there will continue to be demand for high performance, high density Asics. We have never said the Asic market is dead, said Alan Matthews, European marketing director at Xilinx.
According to Gartner, the Asic market will grow by 12 per cent this year.
Asic suppliers increasingly compete with FPGAs in the mid-volume custom market with structured Asics incorporating standard elements to reduce the design time and costs. This can cut 12 months in Asic design, said Casey.