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It's far easier to build a start-up doing software than pretty much any hardware, so current giants have a huge advantage over anyone trying to break in. Consid
by rpcope1 11y ago
It's far easier to build a start-up doing software than pretty much any hardware, so current giants have a huge advantage over anyone trying to break in. Consider for a moment that a new fab with a recent process is probably a many billion dollar investment, and that even fabless semiconductor companies (a la LSI, recently) there are huge amounts of IP, capital, and brain power tied up; everything also really needs to be really correct up front, and tooling is expensive (you wouldn't want to waste millions of dollars building a chip that's really unproven and undesired from a market perspective). Even technologies with less expensive (though not at all cheap) tooling, like hard disk drives, the IP is so tied up with the current giants (WD/HGST/Seagate), and the firmware needed to make the drives work at current capacities is so complex, that it is essentially impossible to break into the market.
- zokier 11y agoOn the other hand the company in question here (Broadcom) was started by essentially two guys in a garage in early to mid-nineties.
- geomark 11y agoThat's the popular legend. But in reality one guy was a professor at UCLA and the other a well paid engineer at TRW. To get started with early development of much of their IP they used considerable resources available to them at their employers, which included funding from government IR&D projects and chip design engineers who were on TRW's payroll. So hardly a garage startup.
- zokier 11y agoWhy would TRW have given away such resources and IP to what would become Broadcom?
- trsohmers 11y agoAs someone starting a fabless semiconductor startup on less than $2 million, I completely agree with you when it comes to starting a fab (Intel's, GF's, and TSMC's new 14-16nm fabs are in the $10 to $15 billion range), but a fabless semiconductor company can be done for the same range as a software startup. While it is not fair to use my startup as an example (as we don't have silicon in hand just yet), you can look here: http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/semiconductor-economics-101/ http://www.adapteva.com/andreas-blog/semiconductor-economics... http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/a-lean-fabless-semiconductor-startup-model/ http://www.adapteva.com/white-papers/a-lean-fabless-semicond...
- rpcope1 11y agoWow, this looks like a really interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
- minthd 11y agoIt could be that the adapteva model(which talks about a highly focused design) fits a small number of start-ups, that are as a generalization, less appealing to VC's due to smaller markets and returns, and most other companies require lots of funding - say $30+ million ?