Designing a product is one thing. Supporting it for ten years is another.
Teams building industrial, medical, infrastructure, or regulated products often discover that the hardest problems do not appear in year one. They appear in year five, seven, or nine — long after the original design decisions were made.
Off-the-shelf silicon works well early. Over long lifetimes, it quietly becomes a liability.
This article explains why long-lifecycle products break down on commodity silicon, where the risks really come from, and when ASIC becomes the safer long-term choice.
Most off-the-shelf components are designed for fast-moving markets.
Consumer demand, rapid refresh cycles, and aggressive node transitions shape how vendors manage their portfolios. Even “industrial” variants are often derivatives of shorter-lived platforms.
Long-lifecycle products expect:
Commodity silicon is optimized for:
These goals eventually conflict.
Supply risk rarely arrives as a sudden discontinuation.
It usually starts with:
Each change may be manageable in isolation. Over time, they accumulate into a significant operational burden.
For regulated or safety-critical products, even minor component changes can trigger expensive requalification.
When an off-the-shelf component changes or disappears, redesign becomes inevitable.
Redesign is not just a technical task. It involves:
For long-lifecycle products, the cost of redesign often exceeds the original savings from using commodity silicon.
Second sourcing is often presented as the solution to supply risk.
In practice, true second sources are rare:
Software and validation effort multiplies
What looks like redundancy on paper often becomes divergence in the field.
ASIC does not eliminate all risk, but it shifts control back to the product owner.
With custom silicon:
ASIC enables alignment between product lifetime and silicon lifetime.
For products that must be supported for a decade or more, that alignment is often worth more than short-term cost savings.
ASIC becomes attractive when:
In these cases, ASIC is not about optimization. It is about risk reduction.
ASIC is not always justified, even for long-lifecycle products.
It may not make sense when:
The decision depends on economics, risk tolerance, and organizational readiness.
Many teams wait until supply problems force action.
By then:
The safest moment to consider ASIC is before supply pressure becomes urgent.
If your product is expected to ship for ten years or more, the question is not whether off-the-shelf silicon will eventually cause problems.
It is when — and how prepared you will be when it happens.
Before committing to redesigns, last-time buys, or emergency mitigation, it helps to step back and evaluate whether custom silicon makes sense for the long term.
Run the 2-minute ASIC or Not? Decision Wizard to get a clear, non-sales recommendation based on lifetime, volume, and risk tolerance.
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