Regional Roundup
The number of independent chipless, fabless and IC design houses in Europe continues to rise, despite a number of acquisitions in this sector. The number of these start-ups in 2006 is up almost 4% over the previous year although this was lower than the rise during 2005. Semiconductor analyst Chris Ryan of Future Horizons says the UK again stands out as having three times as many companies as other European regions with the exception of Israel, which is also included in the report see Figure 1.
Independent IC design is not new. In the late 1970s and early 1980s a number of IC contract design houses started to appear, particularly in the technical and geographical areas created by downsizing, as in the UK.
These successful pioneering companies proved that the ‘IC design company’ model worked in Europe, and later ARM pioneered the ‘chipless IP vendor’ business model and still leads the field. Slightly later came the penetration of the fabless companies, which, in Europe was later than the US so it was after 1990 before industry adopted it enthusiastically.
Studying the map of independent European fabless and IC design company locations, it becomes apparent that there are some geographical groupings or ‘skill centres’.
In the West of England there are nine design companies with strong expertise in processor design, DSP, mobile radio and fast networks and these are centred in the Bristol/Bath area. The CPU companies were almost influenced by the past presence of the transputer company INMOS, which eventually became part of STMicroelectronics design laboratory, also based in Bristol.
Still in the West of England there is a grouping of seven companies with strong analogue/RF expertise in and around Swindon. Other UK groupings are influenced by the presence of universities. There has been a recent growth in Cambridge, namely ARM, Cambridge Consultants, Cambridge Semiconductor, Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) and others. In Edinburgh/Livingston, Scotland, there are nine companies, the largest is Wolfson Microelectronics. Groupings are also seen in Linkoping, Sweden, and Nice, France, and also Leuven, Belgium. The Leuven companies are strong in DSP and are influenced by IMEC. Finally, there are several Dublin-based companies, which have a wide range of skills in the DSP, TV set-top box and mobile radio product areas.
'The UK position is no surprise and Israel has always been a source of new company generation, but Germany and France lag behind the leading two by some margin', said Chris Ryan, semiconductor industry Analyst, Future Horizons. 'The smaller Greece and Switzerland have seen the largest percentage of new design company growth in recent times'
Future Horizons’ European Fabless Semiconductor Report 2007 covers independent IC design companies in Western Europe and Israel.
For queries regarding this report, please contact Chris Ryan cryan@futurehorizons.com tel: +44 (0)1793 840145.
