2 years is too long a time frame for asic companies, I would say a year is how far you can be sure about.
This is generally true, but not true for SWKS. The reason is that their customer’s are not just buying chips, they are partnering with them during design cycles. This gives them at least 2 years of commitment, maybe more.
I could be wrong, my experience is with big, metal/composite tubes that fly with lot’s of people inside them, but just the same when a producer invites a supplier into the game during the design phase your in a whole different ballpark than simply buying parts or even letting contracts to make custom components.
If the supplier is a participant to the product design it says that the producer is saying, “Hey, you guys know a lot more about this space with respect to design and cost effective manufacturing than we do. We need your expertise in order to bring a successful product to market.”
Don’t be duped into the notion of competitive bidding and multi-sourcing of components. This is true for certain components that are either commodity (see earlier discussion) or easy to source from multiple vendors because no special design/manufacturing talent is required. When the opposite is true (as with hyper-complex integrated analog processing) the attitude is more along the lines of forming long-term relationships with single-source suppliers.
It’s true for flying tubes. It’s true for automotive products. I’ll wager it’s true for hand-held computers that pose as telephones/cameras. I’ll wager it’s true for any sophisticated product that must satisfy an abundance of end-user requirements.
Just by way of example, it probably will come as a surprise to most of you to learn that there’s more lines of code in the cabin entertainment system of a modern commercial aircraft than in the flight control avionics package. You don’t swap out vendors willy-nilly due to a 10% price break on something like this.