In spite of what some market analysts might believe, In-Stat/MDR (http://www.instat.com) reports that the Application-Specific IC (ASIC) market is alive and well, and will continue to prosper in the future, albeit at a slower pace than history would have dictated. The high-tech market research firm finds that product differentiation is responsible for this market?s health, and while design starts in customer-specific, cell-based design segment of the ASIC market will flatten out and decline somewhat in the future, revenues will continue to grow. However, structured ASIC and User-Programmable Logic (UPL) design starts will continue their upward trend, without slowdown in the future.

All in all, when all the elements, or in this case design methodologies, are accounted for, design starts, for the overall ASIC market, will continue to slowly increase, i.e., the upsides will more than equalize the downsides. The customer-specific, MOS cell-based market will continue to find use across a wide spectrum of applications, ranging from relatively low volumes of high-complexity and high cost products, to high and very high volumes of lower-complexity and low cost products. While the classic MOS cell-based design methodology will continue to dominate ASIC market revenues throughout the forecast period, it will steadily be losing ground to two other ASIC design alternatives; user-programmable logic and structured ASICs, along with its associated variety of family members. In-Stat/MDR believes that between The Americas, Europe, Japan and Asia Pacific, Asia Pacific will be the most dynamic region, while Europe will be the most static.

In-Stat/MDR has also found the following with regards to this market:

• Worldwide merchant market dollar consumption of customer-specific, cell-based designs, independent of complexity and/or functionality, is forecast to grow from $6,782.5 million in 2003 to $10,759.6 million by 2008, translating to a forecast Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), between 2003 and 2008, of 9.7%.
  
• Consumption in Asia Pacific will grow at more than twice the pace of Europe and Japan, and 6.4 percentage points faster than that of The Americas. Asia Pacific will also represent the only region to see future design starts, in this technology, continuously increase over the forecast period
  
• In the customer-specific, MOS standard cell market, similar to other markets employing customer-specific, high-complexity designs, high-end communications and data processing infrastructure applications will dominate dollar consumption, but not necessarily in that order for every region.

By: DocMemory
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