The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship.

The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expand ecosystems, cement relationships that are cross-industry, and to venture into adjacent markets as well as solidifying positions in existing markets.

These changes are the result of both economic and technology shifts. The convergence of functions into a single device, or at least a couple devices, is opening up markets on a scale that many companies never dreamed possible. Billions of smart phones can mean billions of chip sales. They also will mean a demand for better tools and ready-fit IP that works with both the gate-first and gate-last process technology at whatever power level is required.

For the design and IP industries, this is very good news in the short term. The demand for faster, smaller and cheaper will require some very complex tools because the problems to be solved are orders of magnitude more complex at each new node. At 22nm we likely will see new materials, new transistor structures, new power management techniques, new interface fabrics, and probably even new techniques for bonding and packaging multiple chips.

How all of this plays out in the long-term, however, remains to be seen. After a massive grab for market share, there ultimately will be some consolidation that reduce the number of market segments, the number of very expensive platform designs and ultimately the number of customers for all the tools and IP that will continue to be needed.

At that point there will be a battle to convince those shrinking number of customers that they need to pay top dollar for the value they’re receiving, because fewer customers gives the bargaining edge to the customer rather than the vendor. This is still a couple nodes off, but it may be time to start thinking about this—and possible adjacent markets that need exploring by both customers and tools vendors.

–Ed Sperling

The continuation of Moore’s Law appears less in doubt than ever. Companies such as Intel, ST, AMD (via GlobalFoundries) and IBM are testing FinFETS and ETSOI and work is being done on the back end to ensure that these new structures can be manufactured with sufficient yield.

What’s changed, though, is the resistance by other companies to the progression of Moore’s Law. There is no longer a sense of resignation that they won’t be partaking in the benefits of advanced nodes. In a 3D stacked die world, it doesn’t matter if the digital portion of the chip—particularly the memory and some of the logic and IP—are developed at 15nm or even 6nm. As long as the analog and some of the IP don’t have to follow the same process node progression, then it no longer matters. The rest is an integration exercise, and much of chip development these days is integration, anyway.

This is a fundamental shift for the industry as a whole, and it will require some significant planning at the system level. While it’s still possible to account for hot spots and signal integrity in a two-die structure, it becomes harder with each new layer. Place-and-route models have to include thermal dynamics, and they have to be built for multiple generations in the future so logic doesn’t sit on top of logic and cook the chip into oblivion. This can all done with some foresight and standardized approaches, of course. It’s what engineers are good at.

It also means more standardized interconnect models, most likely a network on chip type of approach, and better understanding of through-silicon vias and their effect on communication within the chip once they begin shrinking at future nodes. But what’s particularly interesting is that suddenly it brings everyone that abandoned Moore’s Law at 180nm back into the race. That means they will have no choice but to re-enter the market for advanced tools for everything from modeling to verification and software prototyping, and from layout to design for manufacturing.

Stacking die, for all its technological evolutionary roots, is a market discontinuity. And at every discontinuity in the industry there has been a scramble for market share, new tools and new customers. Let the race begin.

–Ed Sperling

The acquisition of Chartered by a wholly owned subsidiary of the Abu Dhabi government may sound like a rather brash investment, but our sources say it’s all part of a rather audacious plan that began unfolding one day after the deal to jointly run AMD’s foundry was hatched.

In fact, this is anything but an impulsive buy by a country swimming in oil profits. The plan is actually to integrate two foundries that weren’t quite first-tier—but which also were significantly more successful than second-tier players—to create a mammoth and sophisticated first-tier competitor with deep pockets and broad capabilities.

Chartered has always pulled its weight in the Common Platform development, but it’s hard to gain much attention when your partners are IBM and Samsung and the top competitor is TSMC. And AMD’s role in advanced technology development inside of IBM’s ecosystem has been quite impressive, while its foundry operation has been a drag on profits. AMD simply doesn’t have the resources that Intel does, and owning its own fab is getting to the point where…well…you have to be Intel to still afford it.

By combining the advanced capabilities of AMD’s new fab outside of Albany, N.Y., and the process expertise that Chartered has picked up working with the Common Platform, this could well prove to be an effective combination. Both AMD and Chartered have a strong tie into the IBM ecosystem, and both now have the capital to sustain the investment needed to make a foundry business successful.

But foundries typically are a starting point for government investment, too. China’s investment in SMIC, Taiwan’s support of TSMC, and even Singapore’s support for Chartered are all starting points. The real money is in the business that can be built above the chips, which means lots of investment in tools, engineering talent, schooling and more jobs. It also ultimately means a bigger market and potentially new sources of competition.

But that’s getting ahead of the story. Backing up to the more immediate news—the acquisition of Chartered—you have to wonder just how many facets and how deep the plan by the Abu Dhabi government actually runs. Our guess is this is just phase one.

–Ed Sperling