Differences between ASIC, ASSP and ASIP

ASIC (Application Specified Integrated Circuit) is a customized integrated circuit. It is usually used by a person or company for a very limited usage. So when it is developed, only the person or company who orders it can use it. It is not useful for other usages, for example, an IC designed for a specific line of cellular phones of a company, whereby no other products can use it except the cell phones belonging to that product line.
- ASIC is just built for one and only one customer.
- ASIC is used only in one product line
- Only volume production of ASICs for one product can make sense which means low unit cost for high volume products, otherwise the cost is not efficient.
- Can exploit parallelism to achieve high performance
- Low power consumption

ASSP (Application Specified Standard Processor) is an integrated circuit that implements a specific function that appeals to a wide market, which means its function is specified for example a motor drive chip. But it is used widely, not limited to only one customer as ASIC does. So ASSPs are available as off-the-shelf components which means you can go to electronic shops and just buy it directly from the "shelf". It means ASSPs have been developed well and you can just buy it without designing it from scratch.
- It addresses the product space between ASIC and generic processor based products
- Extremely useful for low to medium volume applications because it help reduce cost and design overheads.

ASIP (application specific instruction processor) is usually used in SoC (System on a Chip). ASIP is an architecture including two parts which are a minimum ISA (Instruction Set Archietecture) and a configurable logic which you can use to design your own instruction set. So it provides relatively high flexibility compared to ASIC and better performance compared to FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). Also, it is cheaper than FPGA, but slightly more expensive than ASIC.
- ASIP can help build your own instruction set to meet your specific requirement.
- It provide a minimum ISA, which can make shorter TTM (Time to Market).

How to choose ASIC or ASSP?
- Whether TTM (Time-To-Marker) allows to design an ASIC
- Whether you have special requirement for your design which is not common in ASSPs, for example, you can exploit parallelism to achieve high performance
- Whether your products can have a big volume in market
- Power consumption requirement
- Whether software development tools are available
- How is the skill of the developers, whether they are capable for designing an ASIC
- Whether you can burden the technology risk for designing AISC
- How much is your plan for NRE (Non-Recurring Expense) cost to the project: ASIC needs relatively large NRE cost, and ASSP needs no NRE cost.