Launched a new product and established a new benchmark for the ASIC semiconductor market
 Situation
In the early 1990’s there was a race by ASIC semiconductor vendors to create gate arrays with the most transistors (gates). Vendors proudly published their largest gate arrays and all battled to have the largest chips. The benchmark for the industry was the number of gates and cents per gate. While gates increase by a function of chip area, the physical pins of the device increase by the periphery of the chip. So as chips grow in size the ratio of pins to gates decreases. However, due to multi-bit processors and wide data busses being used in many designs, the number of physical pins can quickly become the limiting factor.
Hitachi came up with a revolutionary way to increase the pin density on the periphery of the chip, which drastically changed the effective ratio of pins to gates. Hitachi came up with plan to manufacture these new series of gate array devices, the HG62G Series, and it was my job to educate the sales force and market and create a market for this new product line.
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Action Plan
The main challenges were two-fold: How does a new player (Hitachi) establish a presence in the mature market (ASICs), and how do you create excitement and opportunities for new product. Understanding customer needs and positioning a new technology to directly address those needs is the answer.
- Developed marketing plan targeted at customers and designs that suffered from pin limitations
- Created public relations material geared and focused on creating a new benchmark and focusing on advantages of HG62G Series
- Created two new benchmarks for the gate array market: Pin/gate and cents/pin
- Drove analyst tour and contributed to trade publications regarding new benchmark and solution
- Developed internal educational material (both serious and light-hearted) to educate the field sales organization and sales representatives on the sales points and value proposition of the product.
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  Results
- Within months of launch, HG62G series quickly became Hitachi’s best selling gate array in terms of new design wins
- Considered Hitachi’s best ASIC product launch, set the bar for future launches
- All major competitors (especially Japanese competitors) quickly tried to launch or announced competitive solutions
- Elevated Hitachi’s position in the ASIC market and helped gain considerable market awareness
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