Is the Age of Silicon Start-Ups Over? Was the question asked by Peter Claydon, founding CEO of picoChip at the Silicon South-West Viva Entrepreneurs! Meeting in Bath this morning.
Unfortunately, Claydon’s answer was: "It probably is. The Golden Age of the ‘80s and ‘90s has passed."
"I left Deltenna about three months ago and I’m looking around at possibilities," said Claydon, "and starting a silicon company is not top of my list. If you understood what it entails you’d never start – it takes ages to become profitable."
Claydon conceded that there are "small niche opportunities" for silicon companies like "RF for different frequencies" but the opportunity for ‘the big digital chip" has gone.
That’s because the big digital chip goes into things governed by standards bodies "so it takes ages for your chip to be designed into anything."
Compounding the problem for silicon start-ups is the phenomenon is that "there are less things than there used to be."
Claydon instanced TV, GPS terminals, e-Readers, camera, radios and even watches as being subsumed into the ubiquitous mobile handset.
So Claydon is looking at software opportunities. "More and more of everything is being done by software," he said.