ASIC Design the 90's and early 2K's

The dawn of 90's saw the golden era of computing. Microprocessors were getting powerful every year as they followed Moore's Law. 90's saw the x86 chipset display sufficient power to enable investment in GUI's and other efforts to make the computer more user friendly. A similar effect was also seen in the ASIC market. New powerful applications. were now required to harness the improvements in ASIC design.
So teams which till now were satisfied to throw out a micro controller dominated SOC bundled with some limited peripherals started bundling more and more peripheral hardware until the microcontroller was reduced to a fraction of the total SOC area.
A second effort in progress was in the standards organisation. These organisations were now defining the new dawn of the communication era as they started work on defining standards like bluetooth, WLAN, DTV, DSL, the family of mobile Standards etc.

Towards the late 90's we started seeing each of these standards coming out of their draft status. This was the second boost to the ASIC design industry as innumerable startup's mushroomed trying to get their slice of the ASIC market by defining communication chipsets. Anyone who has worked in the ASIC industry in the early 2k's would have certainly spent some time working on chips based on one of these standards.