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ASIC or Not? — Decision Wizard
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Deciding whether to build an ASIC is rarely a clear yes or no. Most teams arrive at the question gradually. FPGA costs rise. Power budgets tighten. Schedules slip. Supply risks appear. At some point, staying on the current platform feels increasingly uncomfortable — but committing to custom silicon feels risky.
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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.
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For startups, ASIC often feels like a forbidden topic.
Too expensive. Too risky. Too slow. Something only big companies with massive budgets can afford.
That perception is outdated — but the opposite mistake is just as dangerous.
Some startups wait far too long to consider ASIC. Others
ASIC is often framed as the “endgame” of hardware development.
Lower unit cost. Better power efficiency. Full control over silicon. It’s easy to assume that moving to ASIC is always a sign of maturity and success.
That assumption causes expensive mistakes.
In reality, some of the worst
Most teams discover their BOM problem too late.
At first, BOM cost is acceptable. Volumes are low, margins are flexible, and speed matters more than optimization. Over time, however, BOM cost stops being a technical detail and becomes a business constraint.
Prices can’t come down. Margins compress. Procurement
Power problems rarely show up as a single failure.
They appear as small compromises: a bigger battery, a thicker enclosure, a thermal pad, a lower clock speed, a disabled feature. Each compromise feels manageable. Over time, they shape the product in ways no one originally intended.
For many
For many teams, MPW feels like the goal.
First silicon arrives. The chip powers up. Basic functionality works. There is a strong sense of relief, and sometimes the assumption that the hardest part is over.
In reality, MPW success is the beginning of a different phase, not the
One of the most frustrating moments in an ASIC project is asking for quotes and receiving answers that feel unusable.
Wide cost ranges. Long timelines. Follow-up questions that seem endless. From the outside, it can feel like vendors are being evasive. From the vendor side, the problem is usually
Most ASIC projects do not fail because the idea was bad.
They fail because risk was misunderstood, hidden, or postponed. By the time problems become visible, the project is already expensive, politically difficult to stop, and painful to fix.
The uncomfortable truth is that most ASIC failures are