In a computer system, there are many different chips combined together in one single motherboard. If you want to sell them, you need to have demo boards for your customers to evalute your chips. Reference design is needed as well. It will be nice if you can provide usage scenarios to your customers and tell them how they can use your chips in their product and the benfit they can get.
CPU: X86(Intel, AMD), RISC(ARM,…), RISC-V
Memory: Samsung, Hynix, Micron, …
PCH
PCIe switch: for servers
CXL siwtch: for servers
Ethernet: Intel, Boradcom, Realtek,…
Wi-fi
GPU
Audio
SATA controller
RAID controller
USB2/3/4
Thunderbolt
Fan controller
BMC: for servers
PCIe adapters such as NIC & storage adapter
How to release your chipset earlier ? Fix all defects then you are good to go. Test everything thoroughly to find all defects. And you can work with your customers who typically find critical defects to run through their tests/usage scenarios(Co-Validation) on your chipset to find defects earlier in the development phase. Then you have chance to close defects much earlier to release your chipset.
Validate chipset: Make a demo board(Customer Reference Board), test features/functions, link speed/bandwidth, error injection, reliability/stability, compatibility(backward included), performance, customer usage scenarios and compliance test if any.