Why success in hardware depends on software
What’s unusual about the semiconductor design and fabrication sector? It’s an industry with both short-term and long-term perspectives … and both are extremes.
The long-term view can be very long. Fabs take years to build; the next technology node is in planning before the previous node has even entered production. But those tens of billions in investment can only be committed if short-term goals are answered. Schedules must be followed. Projects must be executed. Deadlines must be met.
In an industry with thousands of projects and initiatives in play at the same time, a single day’s delay on each can add up to long years falling behind competitors. Losing the trust of customers, investors, and key staff.
It’s why the world’s top chipmakers and equipment manufacturers have very high standards for the software they use to connect and manage project teams. Because ensuring everyone has the right data and tools for their job isn’t just business-critical; it’s mission-critical.
ICT Strypes has a long history with one of the most hardcore companies in the sector – in fact, working with people who design fab equipment is how we developed our entire philosophy of doing business. We call it nearshoring. A human-centered approach to the hardest silicon design problems … building agility into the process to deliver shorter iteration cycles and faster times-to-market.
In a decade plus, we’ve discovered that approach works for many companies in the technology space – semiconductor designers and equipment manufacturers among them. So we wanted to share what makes it special: its advantages and differences. In this article, you’ll see how nearshoring benefits every part of the chipmaking puzzle – and (we hope) how it could benefit your team, too.
Speed and flexibility in the semiconductor sector: innovation ingredients
Mapping the size and complexity of the chip industry is a task that’d make most consultants bury their heads in their hands crying. First, some facts and figures.
- Worth US$600B in 2024 and set to hit $1T by 2030, the semiconductor business builds not a product range but fundamentally different products: CPUs, GPUs, RAM, SSD, and newer NPUs answer completely separate use cases but must work together.
- Desktop machines, laptops, and smaller devices like phones have different requirements for size and power consumption; the same capabilities must be embedded into many formats – and work perfectly in all.
- Huge investment needs coupled with high risks make every new fabrication facility a gamble; a state-of-the-art fab on a 3nm process node costs US$20B+ to build.
- The challenges are many and varied; among sector players, Taiwan’s TSMC is the largest chipmaker yet sells no designs of its own; Nvidia vies with Apple to be the world’s largest company, driven by demand not for graphics but AI compute; once-world leaders like America’s Intel are now a long way behind the curve with an estimated US$50B needed to catch up.
- Mainland China spends $250B importing chips, but is developing better and better ones for its own huge domestic market; over 150 cities have a fab within their borders.
- Skilled engineers in design, process, and equipment are scarce globally; in the age of AI and datacenters, universities aren’t producing enough qualified experts to join the workforce, pushing up costs for chipmakers.
And that’s not all. Beyond the headline names of TSMC, Nvidia, Samsung, and AMD are thousands of fabless chipmakers producing custom designs for applications in industrial processes, specialized compute, and the IoT – even chips optimized to run specific software faster with less energy, keeping datacenters more productive and cost-effective.
Not all of these companies are big. Some are small startups focused on a single Hard Problem; others are hundreds of people serving many customers. But they all need custom software. And what we’re finding is that these idea-driven innovators value two things in their coding partners above all: speed and flexibility.
And that’s what ICT Strypes’ nearshoring delivers.
Semiconductor software nearshoring puts one team by your side, on your own premises – business analysts and strategists seeking to understand how your business works so software can support it most effectively. While the coders who implement those rules are remote, clustered in our Bulgaria hub where they can share experience and expertise. Here are the advantages.
The nearshoring advantage: a strategic enabler
Splitting our project teams across sites adds more than a human touch. Having regional tech talent for semiconductor software leads to an easier experience at all levels: face-to-face co-working enables deeper sharing of knowledge, and on-site work means solutions are a closer fit to reality.
And if you’re in Europe – as many of our clients are – time zones aren’t a problem. While we have a worldwide perspective, our European origins (with bases in both Western and Eastern Europe) give us a head start in EU business practices.
Of course, this means we also share similar legal frameworks, protections for intellectual property, and compliance with non-negotiable consumer regulations like GDPR. Which means less time spent spinning up at the start of each project, and a shallower learning curve as we get to know your business.
The proof: use cases where nearshoring accelerates innovation
Working with some top players in the semiconductor industry, we’ve noticed the same advantages apply in case after case. Let’s look at some recent successes – not individual case studies, but specific parts of the industry where nearshoring is proven to work for semiconductor innovation.
- Embedded systems development for lithography or wafer metrology used to involve waterfall-style development cycles: long integration delays between firmware, control logic, and hardware, with custom toolchains often locked to specific vendors. Agile nearshoring teams for chipmakers turn those waterfalls into Agile workflows, each designed for iterative improvement – with software developed as if you’d coded it inhouse. (Because our team is part of your team.) So a project might take far less time than you expected.
- Toolchain automation and CI/CD pipelines for chip simulation and validation are often manual and monolithic, meaning a single update can break a process – and at worst, having to re-engage with a person who left the company months ago. Nearshoring can make formal verification, logic simulation, and silicon synthesis happen in parallel, with regressions tracked and solved in real-time.
- AI/ML solutions engineered to optimize fab costs and yield blend software and hardware in one market offer. But data scientists are often separate from fab operators, with both sides running different software – leading to slowdowns and disconnects. Nearshoring brings software and hardware teams closer together, unifying their objectives to keep key development pipelines running in sync.
- Edge software for real-time system tuning and monitoring is an unsung hero of software development outsourcing for semiconductors. But many operators still run monolithic firmware and hardcoded tuning routines, with data collected and analyzed after the process due to toolsets that don’t interoperate well. Nearshoring can turn that edge software into microservices and agents deeply integrated but separate applications that can be improved and iterated. Leading to ever-shorter iteration cycles in semiconductor manufacturing.
A recipe for success: nearshoring reduces risk while letting R&D scale
Speed and flexibility are two sides of the same coin. Chipmaking is an industry where a two-year-old product is obsolete (Moore’s Law never went away; it just moved into the AI space) so faster iteration cycles let products reach the market faster.
And flexibility – the ability to switch tracks when the future becomes clearer or move fast to adopt a new method – reduce costs in turn. Both also reduce risk in four distinct ways … while allowing investment in research to produce larger returns, sooner.
Matching team size to market opportunity
Reliable software and processes in the semiconductor design tech stack means teams can scale up and down to match each semiconductor design project without “knowledge decay”. That’s important, since a market-beating chip design often finds applications beyond its intended niche – and new team members must get up to speed quickly. (If the opposite happens and it needs to downsize, there’s a bonus. ICT Strypes always has a pipeline of projects – so a downsize doesn’t mean someone losing their job.)
Taking advantage of strong IP protection
With our European heritage, the strong intellectual property laws of the EU are second nature to ICT Strypes – meaning you don’t have to worry about losing your inhouse software advantages due to lax privacy and security processes. It’s the best of both worlds: your data and custom applications stay yours – but nearshoring also brings you the benefits of a team who’ve experienced and solved your challenges before.
A consistent team and a constant culture
Fully-outsourced teams in other countries can be brilliant, but erratic – you’re getting along great with one developer, then discover he’s been replaced by someone else. Even if projects don’t fall apart, constant headcount changes can cause bottlenecks and frustrations as people are updated and deadlines are missed. ICT Strypes, by contrast, enjoys low team turnover and a culture of knowledge-sharing; some of our team members have been with us for over a decade. Simply because it’s an interesting and enjoyable place to work.
Close collaboration with internal stakeholders
Integration and connectivity don’t just apply to software – but to human relationships, too. At ICT Strypes you’ll find many project teams, like Agile squads and DevOps developers, have worked together before, on similar problems to the ones you face. People from across the organization (now over 650 developers strong) maintain communication, collaboration, and teamwork that crosses departments and functions – so when there’s a missing skill on your nearshoring team, the gap can be closed fast.
CONCLUSION: Chipmaking logic makes logical sense with ICT Strypes
No two ways about it: semiconductor fabs are becoming defined by their software. Those who integrate DevOps and Agile methods to apply custom applications across research, design, testing, and manufacturing – the entire engineering stack – will move faster, innovate more effectively, and enjoy better yields.
It’s true innovation in chip design with software partners – bringing together the right expertise, from the right places, in the right areas of know-how.
And if you’re in the chip business, we’d like to share our stories of semiconductor software nearshoring and innovation with you.
Get in touch with our experts today.