CEO Interview: Dan McCranie, Virage Logic
Portable Design News, Friday August 29, 2008
It’s tough being in the semiconductor business. Growth is slow, margins are under pressure, and fab costs are headed for the roof. Once upon a time you could knock out a design, put it in your catalog and take orders. Now to make a sale you have to practically design the whole product for your customer, handing them the Gerber files along with the purchase order. The real value add is no longer manufacturing, it’s IP.
As a semiconductor IP house, Virage Logic is ahead of that curve. Founded in 1995, the company has traditionally developed embedded memory products, more recently adding logic and I/O interface products, including Double Data Rate (DDR) memory controllers, Physical Interfaces (PHYs), and Delay Locked Loops (DLLs). Virage’s customers are primarily foundries and large IDMs.
Virage Logic’s CEO Dan McCranie sees the IP industry benefiting from both the explosion in complexity of SoC designs—where a design team just doesn’t have the time to design everything—and the trend for semiconductor companies to go ‘fab light’ or fabless. The ‘whether to buy’ decision regarding semiconductor IP has been replaced by ‘who to buy’.
Portable Design sat down recently with McCranie in his office to ask about the nature and future of the semiconductor IP industry. Not surprisingly, he was bullish about both.
