ASICs, for all the advantages they offer, are an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. But do they have to be? That's the question semiconductor vendor Marvell has posed with the launch of its custom ASIC offering.

The capability builds on technologies acquired with the purchase and integration of ASIC vendor Avera Semiconductor last November. The purchase came just 18 months after that company was founded. However, Avera wasn't new to ASICs by any means. The company was spun off by Global Foundries after it left the semiconductor market in 2018. And prior to that, the Avera team was part of IBM's ASIC division.

So while as a company Avera may have been a blip on the semiconductor radar, to Marvell's involvement, the company's experience in the ASIC market dates back more than 25 years.

The new program represents "the culmination of a year's worth of work as we've integrated the Avera custom ASIC team into the Marvell company," said Kevin O'Buckley, GM of Marvell ASIC, in an interview with SDxCentral. The offering represents "the single most comprehensive infrastructure ASIC offering," and positions Marvell to become the "one-stop semiconductor manufacturer partner for the whole industry."

The chipmaker aims to provide customers with the flexibility to integrate their intellectual property into Marvell's existing product lines, like the Octeon TX2, Fusion, or ThunderX2, develop and manufacture fully custom ASICs, and everything in between.

This is a dramatic departure from the options available to hardware vendors just a few years ago, O'Buckley explained. Until recently, most companies requiring hardware had to choose between using a standard product — a market that Marvell is already heavily entrenched — or invest in their own custom ASIC product.

This decision, O'Buckley said, was often heavily influenced by economics. "If I look at the most simple, lowest cost 7-nanometer chip that I've seen an effective sizing for, when you look at front-end design resources and verification, design for test, physical design implementation, mask set, you're in for a minimum of a $50 million investment."

In some cases, complex designs can cost several times that, O'Buckley added. "The reality is there's just not the scale and enough companies to support that type of investment to match the demand for custom silicon," he said.

So, Marvell set out to give customers a third option.

"We at Marvell are uniquely positioned to offer our customer all of the IP and building blocks that we've built into our standard products and are now offering them to our customers to give them a lower investment, faster time to market, and a high confidence in a first-time-right implementation of their custom chips," O'Buckley said.

And as evidence of this commitment, Marvell isn't holding anything back.

"There are no sacred cows that we put in a special box to hide behind a Marvell logo," O'Buckley said. "Whether you're talking about our most significant investments in server processor cores, or our infrastructure and AI processors, the latest ethernet [physical layer], they are all available to our customers in a custom silicon implementation."

Customers can now go to Marvell to build entirely custom chips, integrate their technology into an existing product, or cherrypick the Marvell IP they need for a particular use case. The result is an ASIC that is designed from the ground up to accelerate certain workloads but also features general-purpose cores for everything else.

This flexibility enables customers to focus more attention on what they're good at rather than exhausting energy developing functionality that, while necessary, could be better served by implementing Marvell's existing technologies, O'Buckley said. "Marvell allows them to get to market much more quickly and without having to invest externally in third parties, or have their own designed teams developing things like industry-standard interfaces and other elements," he explained.