The GSA points out that the chip market shrank 1.9% last year and is forecast to grow only 1.4% this year.

Morgan Stanley points out that semiconductor IPOs were 5% of all US tech IPOs in 2015 – compared to 25% in 2005.

The GSA says industry CAGR was 4.4% 2004-14 compared to worldwide GDP growth of 6%.

Why? The GSA answers: Rising design cost, increasing time to market, decreasing margins and rising capex.

So what’s the answer? The GSA reckons open-source is the answer.

In the software world, open-source software is everywhere: 95% of web servers run on Linux; 85% of smartphones use Android.

But, asks the GSA, how about open-source hardware?

At the chip level, there’s the possibility for groups or individuals to set up micro-fabs based on older equipment and processes combined with open-source design tools and libraries.

At the system level, open-source hardware like Raspberry Pi and Arduino “give users a low-cost way to design simple computers, robots, thermostats and other devices,” says the GSA report.

The GSA reckons: “Although still at a relatively nascent stage, open-source hardware has already managed to positively disrupt the semiconductor industry by encouraging innovation, reducing development costs and accelerating time-to-market.”

Another catalyst for kick-starting chip industry growth is the development of new open-source instruction set architectures like the Berkeley RISC-V. Chip vendors pay millions of dollars to use proprietary instruction set s – RISC-V is freely available under licence.

And another potential catalyst is re-programmable chips. Inexpensive, possibly flash-based FPGAs, could unlock the true value of the IP put into them. Programmables hit the sweetest spot for a profitable chip industry product – the standard programmable part.

McKinsey finds puzzling the chip industry’s “inability to monetise the increasing value of the software bundled into their chips.”

Decimating the cost of making ICs by introducing more programmability, while charging for differentiated and application-specific software within the IC could solve that problem.

The GSA’s approach follows the Makimoto’s Wave principle of succeeding decades of customisation and standardisation.

It may well be that excessive customisation has led to the semiconductor industry’s current growth blight. Even the big programmables companies have been pursuing ever-increasing customisation in their products for a couple of decades.

Dr Makimoto has himself come up with the route to a new era of standardisation which he calls the Highly Flexible Super Integration (HFSI).

What got MITS, Osborne, Sinclair, Apple, Dragon, Oric and a host of computer pioneers going in the late 1970s was the availability of microprocessors – standard programmable parts – from Intel, Motorola, Western Design Centre, and others.

The computer industry then drove chip industry growth for 30 years.

What the GSA is suggesting – open-source hardware – could be just the recipe to get the chip industry going again by putting the tools for regeneration into the hands of currently unknown geniuses.