By Phil Jones
A UK start-up has set an October deadline for its assault on the semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) market, a business that Siroyan Technology Ltd founder and CEO Ken Will claims is founded on flawed, short-term business models, and which is ripe for a fresh, more customer-centric approach.
According to Will today’s SIP practitioners, such as fellow UK player ARM Holdings Plc, have predicated their practices and products on 15-year-old technologies and outmoded business plans which serve their own interest, but only offer short-term benefits to their customers. Hard core designers like ARM, argues Will, appear to offer their customers the flexibility to respond to changing market requirements and realize shorter time to market cycles, when in reality they are still locking their customers to proprietary tools, and product specific foundries.
Will plans to introduce a soft core strategy that will exploit state of the art electronic design automation technology, and advanced registered transfer logic (RTL) tools to give customers greater control and more production choices. The Siroyan strategy will be to make SIP truly portable, Will argues.
Critically, Will promises that Siroyan will also introduce a new risk sharing model into the SIP implementation market, offering prospective customers a standard contract which will assume a mixed revenue stream involving competitive licensing of designs and tools, supplemented by a royalties clause. This new business model, Will said, has the potential of offering Siroyan better long-term revenue growth, while giving customers a cheaper alternative to conventional licensing deals.
The proof of Siroyan’s plans will have to wait until October though. The company has just lured top MPEG guru Adrian Wise away from LSI Logic, and Will said he expects to recruit another five or six leading chip architects to lead the company’s design efforts. But until funding issues are resolved in the next couple of months, Will said he plans to keep a tight lid on the details of Siroyan’s technology and marketing plans.
