Benefits of custom silicon

• Can be designed to integrate perfectly with a custom operating system

• Can be designed to support proprietary features

• Can be purpose built

• Can provide a significant competitive advantage due to the previous bullet

points

Drawbacks of custom silicon

• Requires expensive on-staff expertise

• Requires expensive fabrication facilities

• Often slow to market

• Return on investment can be slow

• Long ROI can lead to longer product lifecycles

Benefits of merchant silicon

• Easy to design around with well-supported APIs

• ASIC vendors are motivated to make stable, successful, and fast products

• Fast to market

• ASIC vendor does one thing: make ASICs

• No overhead involved (no expensive ASIC designers to staff, or expensive

manufacturing facilities to build and maintain, etc.)

• Easy to implement, newer ASICs

Drawbacks of merchant silicon

• No custom or proprietary hardware features are possible (the chips may support

proprietary features, but anyone that uses these chips has access to them)

• No inherent competitive advantage; any vendor can use same ASIC, although

the implementation may be better with one vendor over another