Computational Software:Powering the Intelligent Systems Era Anirudh Devgan, President and CEO, Cadence Design Systems and ESD Alliance Governing Council Member

Note: I turn this week’s Bridging the Frontier blog over to Anirudh Devgan, President and CEO, Cadence Design Systems and ESD Alliance Governing Council Member, to give us his view of Computational Software. His viewpoint first appeared in the ESD Alliance newsletter distributed at SEMICON West/DAC. It’s now available on the ESD Alliance website.

I truly believe this is the golden era of semiconductors. Nearly everything in our lives is becoming digital and everything digital requires semiconductors. Today, the industry is about $500B and is on the path to $1T in the next few years. The overall semiconductor industry has always been cyclical, but I believe it is becoming less so, in fact, it is rapidly becoming a fundamental growth industry.

The generation and processing of data, especially unstructured data, is impacting everything from device compute, to the edge and to the cloud. It is transformational in many ways and has led to the emergence of data-driven algorithms and AI semiconductor compute. The motivation is to process the unstructured data and get intelligence out of it. Technology innovations are enabling waves of new products for many applications such as automotive, mobile, manufacturing, healthcare and even the rise of the metaverse. This fundamental trend will continue for decades, and it’s a thrill to be in the middle of it all.

Another growth driver is systems companies’ in-house semiconductor development to optimize the application architectures to maximize performance, address power efficiencies and improve the safety and security of their end products, plus the added benefit of increased control of their supply chain. Also emerging is a new era of system in a package (SiP) and the creation of chiplets. As Moore’s law matures, this will provide a massive improvement in system performance while focusing on the compute portion that benefits most from new process node technologies. EDA must provide an integrated platform to design and analyze all the aspects of SiP and chiplets, which is quite a challenge, with Die-to-Die IP playing a critical role. Overall these enable designers to combine the benefits of advanced semiconductor node innovation with other architectural changes to increase data processing throughput within power and form factor constraints.

The convergence of mechanical and electrical systems, mechatronics, is another big trend. Designers and enterprises need to link the electronics world with the mechanical world. When you come from the mechanical world, the first thing you see is not the chip, it’s the PCB and the packaging—so there is a more and more of a critical focus on advanced packaging in PCBs and chips along with these mechanical systems.

The EDA industry is investing in three areas to overcome the slowing of Moore’s Law to deliver system performance within reasonable cost and schedule parameters: In AI, to improve the quality of results and designer productivity to design billion-gate chips for advanced-process nodes; in 3D-IC technologies, to continue to integrate more high-performance functionality in a single package; and in system design and analysis, for purpose-built compute and task performance optimization.

The cloud is a great enabler. With SaaS e-commerce, cloud-first teams now can ramp up quickly and operate more efficiently. But it will become more than just availability in the cloud. The ecosystem needs to work there. Collaboration with foundries and manufacturing in the cloud is critical for the next phase of cloud deployment. And other aspects of the ecosystem also need to be incorporated.

We also need to remember that we play a role beyond ourselves and our industry, and we have a responsibility to do more to contribute to our community, both regionally and worldwide. We can do this by enabling charitable organizations with financial support. We can also support diversity, equity and inclusiveness in our business and with suppliers. And, last but not least, we can make our products and operations be more sustainable with a lower impact on the environment. By doing this, we will not only advance the broader electronic design community but will also make a positive impact on our environment and society.

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