On April 10th, MediaTek announced the launch of the industry's first 56-Gigabit PAM4 SerDes silicon intellectual property with a 7-nm FinFET Silicon-Proven, further expanding its ASIC product line.
Most of Taiwan’s semiconductor companies started with technical services. When MediaTek was founded, it once provided technical services to a number of IC companies, the main business of MediaTek was concentrated in the ASSP market in the past, and it began to focus on ASIC business recently. MediaTek's ASIC services are dedicated to assisting in the search for professional design and customized chip design solutions. Customer service scope is expected to cover any stage from front-end to back-end system and platform design, system single-chip design, system integration and physical layout, as well as production support and product import. In various fields, including wired and wireless communications, ultra-high performance computing, low-power IoT, wireless connectivity, personal multimedia, advanced sensors, and radio frequency.
Macroscopically, the ASIC business has existed for a long time, but the rise of the blockchain in recent years, such as this year's Ether Coin, is also an ASIC business model. There will be later AI operations in the data center, such as Google's TPU, including high-speed computing in the data center. Now it is possible to use FPGAs, and later a lot of them will be converted to ASICs. Bitcoin is a very typical ASIC application case. The earliest bitcoin mining was begin from housewives and students, they digging with PCs by using the computer CPUs, later they discovered that the GPU mining performance was higher. Until the last Bitmain developed a dedicated mining ASIC, greatly improving the mining efficiency.
During the ASSP period, MTK developed ICs that could be sold to different customers. The advantage is that it can balance costs. The disadvantage is that all customers use similar products and lack differentiation. The ASIC model is an IC developed for the specific needs of a certain customer. Basically, this IC is sold only to this customer. The IC development cost under this business model will be higher than the ASSP model. Its advantage is that Can produce greater differentiation with competitors. With the current market scale of ASICs around the world, almost every industry needs ASICs and has a market size of nearly US$10 billion.
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