The UK ASIC market: not-so-little Britain

How times have changed from a few years ago!

The ASIC market in the UK has come a long way from the murkiness of 2009, and, happily, we’ve since seen the demand for top-notch ASIC / SoC designers increasing year on year.

This has, in large part, been as a result of the enormous success of “home grown” powerhouses such as Imagination and ARM. But success breeds success, therefore in recent years we’ve seen an energising trend with foreign companies recognising and tapping into UK design competencies and setting up shop on our shores; NVIDIA's acquisition of Icera and Samsung’s purchase of part of CSR being two recent high profile examples. This has resulted in a lively market in areas from telecommunications and wireless communications to digital media to GPU computing.

There’s no doubt that the silicon landscape in the UK has changed; we’re now seeing strong UK-owned market leaders intermingled with myriad overseas investors; many of whom are calling for experts in RTL Design, Verification and Physical Design.

All this makes for a very optimistic outlook for the rest of the year!

The Rise of Formal Verification

In the past, Formal Verification was something often discussed and rarely implemented, pushed aside for simulation based techniques. With only a select few specialists in this area the technology that has been around for over a decade looked set to sit on the bench, despite its obvious advantages in reducing the time and cost of ASIC design, when compared to standard functional verification techniques.

Here at IC Resources, we have noticed a shift in this trend in recent years, with a huge rise in the demand for engineers with formal verification experience, and indeed for specialist engineers concentrating solely on formal verification and its development. So where did this come from?

A definite source has been the growing number of researchers concentrating on formal methods, who have joined companies with the specific intention of expanding the use of these techniques to improve functional verification, and succeeding! With the rising complexity of IC designs, formal verification is now more important than ever, and looks set to become a standard part of all future verification plans. Hooray!

Click on the links below to view all the formal verification opportunities available today, and get involved!

Formal Verification & Validation Engineer - London
Formal Verification R&D Engineer - Cambridge
Principal Verification Engineer - Cambridge
Digital Design Verification Engineer - Bristol
Staff Verification Engineer - Sheffield
Senior Verification Engineer - Munich

A day in the life of IC Resources

Good news for IC companies in the UK

Late last year, Neil Dickins (a founder of IC Resources) worked closely with NMI to submit two detailed reports to government about skills shortages in our sector.

This work has resulted in IC Design Engineering and IC Test Engineering appearing on the Skills Shortage List, which makes obtaining visas for such professionals a quicker and easier process.

Hopefully this will help the UK to convince foreign companies / investors thinking about setting up new design centres that the UK is the right place to do business.

Any questions, please contact us asap.