For more information, visit https://semico.com/content/soc-silicon-and-software-design-cost-analysis.
The semiconductor industry is faced with several substantial issues—the continuing rise in design costs for complex SoCs, the decrease in the incidence of first-time-right designs, and the increase in the design cycle time against shrinking market windows and decreasing product life cycles. An additional factor has now been added to SoC design costs with the emergence of complicated software applications intended to run on SoC silicon. A new Semico Research report, SoC Silicon and Software Design Cost Analysis (SC103-23), forecasts the average design cost for Advanced Performance Multicore SoCs across all geometries will reach $12.2M by 2027.
“Although design costs for complex SoCs have increased, respins and long design cycle times are not optimum conditions for the SoC market; however, their effect on market growth has been minimal,” says Jim Feldhan, President, Semico Research. “One bright area is the rise of the 3rd Party IP industry and its positive impact in helping to supply better and more varied solutions to designers at reasonable cost. This helps keep the design cycle time from ballooning and allows designers to highly differentiate their products from their competition with a fraction of the effort.”
Additional key findings include:
- For the first time, software design costs were roughly equal to silicon design costs at the 28nm node, and for each subsequent node software costs are significantly higher than silicon costs.
- Designs at 28nm remain reasonably popular in 2023, but they are expected to decline starting in 2024.
- The average design cost for Basic SoCs across all geometries is forecast to have a -3.0% CAGR by 2027.
- The average design cost for all SoCs across all geometries is forecast to increase to $6.7M by 2027.
