* Merchant silicon developers aim to serve the largest possible market and therefore have incentive to ensure their chips provide a fully standards-based solution; building in proprietary features would only reduce potential market adoption. ASIC developers follow the opposite tack: with non-standard, proprietary features, they lock their customers into a closed system and keep a stranglehold on their acquired market segment.

* Merchant silicon developers typically work closely with standards groups to ensure their chips support -- and evolve to continue to support -- every facet of a standard to ensure the broadest applicability and longest life. A single product vendor's ASIC, by contrast, may focus only on select aspects of a standard. Furthermore, it is less likely that a product vendor will undertake an expensive redesign simply to improve adherence to an evolving standard.

* Standards-based chips mean fewer protocols to manage and decrease the risk of a chip not operating properly. And common programming interfaces enable equipment designers to use their software through successive generations of equipment, providing a longer-living asset than a single generation, in-house chip design, which further reduces TCO.

The open ecosystem around merchant silicon also accelerates time-to-market for both new products and feature upgrades to existing products. Product vendors using merchant silicon can leverage the work of specialty silicon and software developers and focus their own engineering on system-level innovation.