A chip becomes a product only when a customer builds it into something that sells. Between the first idea and that moment lie several stages: deciding what to build, designing it, making first samples, getting customers to choose it, qualifying it for their markets, ramping production, and eventually retiring it. How long each stage takes depends heavily on the market: a phone chip follows a yearly cycle, while a car chip can take years to reach the road and then stay in production for decades. This article walks through the stages using companies' own disclosures and industry standards.
8 min read | Beginner
What You'll Learn
- Explain how chip companies decide which products to build
- Describe the stages from concept to production and end of life
- Explain what a design win is and why it matters
- Compare product timelines in consumer, industrial and automotive markets
Deciding What to Build
Because a chip's engineering cost is spent before it earns anything, as How Chip Companies Make Money explains, companies decide carefully which chips to build. The process usually starts with product marketing, which studies customers and competitors and writes a market requirements document (MRD) and a business case; job postings for product marketing roles describe MRDs as the documents engineering uses to develop future products and roadmaps[1]. The market requirements are then turned into product requirements and technical specifications[2].
A business case review decides whether a project is funded, continued or stopped[3]. The reviewers usually include product management, engineering and finance, and roadmapping guides stress that someone must have the final decision[4]. Engineers take part by estimating effort, risk and schedule, and the architecture work described in From Idea to Silicon: Who Does What begins once a project is approved.
The Stages of a Chip Product
Names and details vary between companies, but the stages are broadly the same:
| Stage | What happens |
|---|---|
| Concept and approval | market requirements, business case, funding decision |
| Architecture and specification | block diagram, budgets, detailed specs |
| Design and verification | RTL, verification, implementation, up to tape-out |
| First silicon and bring-up | the first chips are tested and debugged |
| Sampling | engineering samples go to selected customers for evaluation |
| Qualification | reliability and stress testing, and the customer's own qualification of its product |
| Production ramp | volume manufacturing as customers' products launch |
| Mature production | steady supply, cost reductions, derivative products |
| End of life | notice to customers, last orders, final shipments |
Some companies first build small test chips on shared wafers, called multi-project wafers, to try new circuits at lower cost before committing to a full product[5].
Design Wins: How Customers Are Won
For most chip companies, revenue depends on design wins: a customer choosing a chip for one of its products. Customers evaluate samples, build the chip into their designs and qualify their own products before ordering in volume. The time from starting a design to earning revenue can be long. One chip company reports that this takes up to three years in the audio-video market and up to five years in automotive, where it describes the design cycle as "substantially longer and more onerous"[6]. Another describes a development and testing stage of three to twelve months followed by three to twelve months of qualification by the customer before mass production[7].
A design win is not yet revenue: it becomes revenue only if the customer's product launches and sells. This gap is one reason chip companies' plans, and their hiring, can change when customers change theirs.
Quick Check
Q: A company wins a design slot in a car maker's next model. Why might it earn little from that chip for several years?
Show Answer
The car maker must finish its own design, qualify the chip and the car, and start production before ordering in volume. Companies report that this can take up to about five years in automotive, so revenue from a win arrives long after the win itself.
Timelines Differ by Market
Phones and consumer products move fastest. Flagship phone processors are launched about once a year, and the yearly cadence is driven by phone makers' launch schedules[8]. Chips are taped out well ahead of launch so that they can be tested and corrected; one phone maker's own processor was reported taped out well before the phone it was made for[9].
Automotive moves slowest. Car chips must pass a stress-test qualification defined by the Automotive Electronics Council, AEC-Q100, which sources describe as taking from about six months to a year and a half, partly because many tests must run one after another[10]. Functional safety standards add their own development requirements. Once in production, car chips are expected to stay available for a long time: one large supplier offers availability commitments of 7, 10, 15 and 20 years, and in 2025 extended one family of automotive microcontrollers to at least 2038[11].
Industrial and medical products also need long availability. One industry guide notes that chip lifecycles have shortened to roughly four to seven years while industrial and medical products often ship for ten to twenty years or more[12], which is why long-term supply commitments matter to these customers.
Where Is This Used?
A small design-and-supply contract announced in 2025 shows a full automotive and industrial timeline in one example: design work started in April 2025, the chip was to be qualified to the AEC-Q100 automotive standard, and supply revenue was forecast to start in 2027 and continue for several years[13].
End of Life
Eventually every chip is retired, because demand falls, a process is closed or a newer product replaces it. Chip companies announce this through a product change notice (PCN) or end-of-life notice, which gives customers a last date to order, called a last-time buy, and a later last shipment date[14]. An industry standard for these notices, J-STD-048, calls for at least six months from the notice to the last-time buy and twelve months to final delivery[12]. Customers who need the chip longer must buy enough stock, find a replacement or redesign their product.
For engineers, the stages mean that work on one chip continues long after tape-out: supporting customers, fixing problems found in qualification, creating cost-reduced or derivative versions, and handling changes late in a product's life.
Quick Check
Q: Why do industrial and automotive customers care so much about how long a chip will be available?
Show Answer
Their products are sold and maintained for ten to twenty years or more, and changing a chip means redesigning and requalifying the product. Long availability commitments and orderly end-of-life notices protect them from that cost.
Summary
- Products start with market requirements and a business case; a review decides whether a project is funded.
- A chip moves through architecture, design, first silicon, sampling, qualification, production and end of life.
- Revenue depends on design wins, which can take up to about three years in consumer audio-video and five in automotive to turn into revenue.
- Phone chips follow a yearly cycle; automotive chips need lengthy qualification and long availability.
- End-of-life notices give customers at least six months to place final orders under the industry standard.
Sources
- Product marketing job postings describing MRDs and business cases, for example Renesas senior product marketing specialist and senior product marketing manager posting.
- Mastering the semiconductor product requirements document, QRA Corp.
- CFO guide to technology roadmapping, ACCA.
- Product and technology roadmaps and roadmapping processes, Dave Litwiller, 2022.
- ASIC design service guide, MAZeT (multi-project wafers to reduce NRE).
- Valens Semiconductor annual report (20-F), 2024, SEC filing.
- Magnachip Semiconductor annual report (10-K), SEC filing.
- Why flagship smartphones won't slow down their release cycles, Gizchina.
- Tensor G5 for Pixel 10 tapes out, PhoneArena.
- Parallel testing of automotive products for faster time to market, Electronic Specifier; The road to AEC-Q100 qualification, Weebit Nano.
- Product longevity, STMicroelectronics; ST pledges 20-year availability for SPC58 automotive microcontrollers, Hackster.io, 2025.
- A practical playbook for PCNs, last-time buys and sourcing controls, Altium.
- EnSilica agrees $18m design and supply ASIC contract, New Electronics, March 2025; contract details, Microwave Journal.
- Example end-of-life product change notice, Diodes Incorporated.
