In this White Paper, commissioned by ARM, author and leading industry commentator John Blyler (jblyler), takes a look at the current economics of custom System-on-Chip development relative to discrete IC boards, and analyses just where the tipping point in favour of custom designs lies.
"Custom System-on-Chip (SoC) semiconductors have now reached a cost point to compete directly with traditional discrete IC board products. Many original electronic manufacturing (OEM) companies of printed circuit boards are reconsidering a SoC implementation as a way to reduce the bill-of-material (BoM) costs, shrink the product size and power consumption, and add new features such as wireless connectivity and sensor processing. Further, moving to a custom SoC has several inherent advantages, such as design IP protection, supply chain end-of-life (EoL) security and mitigating the slowing of Moore’s law."
Multi project wafer (MPW) make it even more compelling to build SoCs, it allows cheap prototyping, and even enables applications that require small quantities of products. http://info.sondrel.com/affordable-silicon-for-your-iot-ic-0
Dynamics around ASIC vs discrete board explained in a very simple language .