For our talk we propose to discuss how across the electronics world, companies are moving away from using classic methods to construct chips using off-the-shelf IP, and are more and more needing to add flavor to their designs with custom silicon. The demand is being driven by the need to 1.) Differentiate solutions from the competition, 2.) Provide more control over supply chain, 3.) Design requirements advancing so fast that off-the-shelf components don’t exist to meet the specifications. In our talk we will go over these scenarios and provide examples in different industry verticals that are driving the need for custom silicon. We will also go over some of the challenges in making custom silicon easily accessible, including the limited engineering resources available to work on such designs, and the economic challenges of procuring a semiconductor design team. We will discuss how analog design is a key gating part of the semiconductor design process and that finding the right resources to break the bottleneck is one of the keys to sustained growth in semiconductor design.