The topic of this blog entry will address a different kind of "shortage" in the semiconductor industry – one of R&D resources. The R&D resource shortage has been persistent and difficult to solve – partly because of the complexity and cost of semiconductor R&D along with a perennial human talent shortage. This created an inherent burden for the entire industry and slowed growth (especially for custom silicon) while driving away venture funding for innovation, creating a vicious negative cycle. If the industry does not solve this problem, a new kind of chip shortage will be created by the huge demand for a variety of custom silicon in the future.
Some OEM’s like Apple have long recognized this limitation and built vertical integration of silicon R&D to solve it. However, this has been a brute force approach only accessible to the most deep-pocketed OEM’s. The rest of the industry is limited by the old R&D model. Celera envisions a new paradigm in silicon development and has built a full end-to-end custom silicon development platform powered by software - not limited by human speed and headcount.
