Roberto Frazzoli Roberto Frazzoli is a contributing editor to EDACafe. His interests as a technology journalist focus on the semiconductor ecosystem in all its aspects. Roberto started covering electronics in 1987. His weekly contribution to EDACafe started in early 2019.
2020 year in review
December 31st, 2020 by Roberto Frazzoli
Needless to say, the Covid-19 pandemic turned 2020 into a nightmare. It also changed most people’s working life, shutting down in-person gatherings and replacing them with virtual events. Still, 2020 was an exciting year for the semiconductor industry and related segments – in terms of market growth, technological innovation, and overall evolution. As we approach the year’s end, let’s try to briefly summarize some of the major events and themes that characterized the last twelve months.
Credit: yavuzunlu – depositphotos.com
A record year for acquisitions
The most apparent characteristic of 2020 was definitely the large number of sizeable acquisitions, either announced or completed. This obviously refers to the Nvidia-Arm, AMD-Xilinx, Analog Devices-Maxim and Infineon-Cypress deals, but also to many other smaller yet significant acquisitions. During 2020, EDACafe reported about approximately fifty of them.
In the EDA industry, Synopsys was definitely in an acquisition mode as it bought Tinfoil Security, Qualtera, Moortec, Light Tec, and certain IP assets of Invecas. More EDA and IP related deals include Ansys-Lumerical, Siemens-UltraSoC, Siemens-Avatar, Silvaco-CWS, Silvaco-Dolphin Design, Arteris IP-Magillem, Galaxy-Quantix.
In the semiconductor industry, other significant deals included Dialog-Adesto, Mellanox-Titan, STMicroelectronics-Exagan, Silicon Labs-Redpine Signals (limited to a specific business), Diodes-Lite-On, u-blox-Thingstream, MagnaChip selling some businesses to a special purpose company, Nvidia-Mellanox, Intel-Moovit, MaxLinear-Intel’s Home Gateway Platform Division, DSP Group-SoundChip, Synaptics-Broadcom (clearly limited to some specific assets), STMicroelectronics-BeSpoon, STMicroelectronics-Riot Micro, Analog Devices-Invecas (limited to the HDMI business), Allegro-Voxtel, MaxLinear-NanoSemi, Microchip-Tekron, STMicroelectronics-Somos, Marvell-Inphi, Nordic Semiconductor-Ensigma, Microchip-LegUp Computing, SK Hynix-Intel’s NAND business, Smart Global Holdings-Cree LED business, Intel-SigOpt, Swissbit-Hyperstone.
More acquisitions in various industry segments included Apple-Voysis, National Instruments-OptimalPlus, Keysight-Eggplant, Summit Interconnect-ITL Circuits, Foretellix-Metamoto, PDF Solutions-Cimetrix, MediaTek-Intel Enpirion, Apple-Xnor.ai, TE Connectivity-First Sensor, Molex-Fiberguide Industries.
Across all industry segments, many of this year’s acquisitions can be considered as a consequence of the growing complexity of every single area of electronics. Complexity requires the integration of additional pieces of know-how: what used to be an optional complement from a third-party or from an ecosystem partner, becomes an essential part of a company’s core business. Examples include the integration of different computing platforms in datacenters (CPUs, GPUs, DPUs), but also EDA vendors buying on-chip monitoring IP specialists, or FPGA vendors buying software tool companies.
The benefits of artificial intelligence in EDA were a hot theme in 2020. Several EDA vendors introduced AI-based innovations in 2020: they include Synopsys, with solutions for place & route and for design space optimization, and Cadence for simulation. Ansys, too, expressed its interest in AI for multiphysics simulation. In 2020 Silicon Integration Initiative (Si2) launched a new special interest group focused on the opportunities in artificial intelligence and machine learning for electronic design automation. And Google researchers also contributed to this trend with a paper on AI-based place & route.
More EDA innovation in 2020 obviously targeted the growing needs of SoC design, with both large vendors and small specialized companies offering solutions aimed at shortening the design cycle by shifting left various steps of the flow.
PLM (product lifecycle management) became a buzzword in EDA in 2020, with the Siemens-UltraSoC acquisition and with announcements from Methodics and Synopsys.
Cloud computing for EDA was an important theme too, with agreements involving Microsoft Azure on one side and Cadence and Synopsys on the other side. Samsung Foundry, for its part, launched its Cloud Design Platform (CDP) in collaboration with Rescale.
FPGA evolution
As far as FPGAs are concerned, obviously the single most relevant event of 2020 was the AMD acquisition of Xilinx. From a technology point of view, significant developments included Achronix adding a network-on-chip to its architecture, and the increasing importance of software tools aimed at making it easier for developers to implement their applications on FPGAs (including neural network algorithms) without prior FPGA design experience. Confirming the trend initiated in 2019 by Xilinx’ Vitis and Intel’s oneAPI, in 2020 new software tools have been introduced by Microchip and Lattice.
Semiconductor manufacturing processes
With the start of volume productions for some 5-nanometer chips, 2020 saw the increasing use of EUV lithography. Chiplet-based devices continued to grow, too, driven also by Intel which joined the CHIPS Alliance to promote Advanced Interface Bus.
This year also confirmed the important role – as sources of innovation – played by two European research institutes: Imec (Belgium) and CEA-Leti (France). In 2020, Imec was engaged in research on GaAs- and GaN devices on silicon; tungsten buried power rail integration in FinFET CMOS; interconnects based on ruthenium semi-damascene and airgap technology; carbon nanotube pellicles for EUV photomasks protection; molybdenum disulfide transistors; etc. CEA-Leti was engaged in research on gate-all-around nanosheet devices; the fabrication of FDSOI CMOS devices without exceeding 500°C; active interposers for chiplet assembly; etc.
AI accelerators, a thriving industry segment
Confirming last years’ trend, 2020 saw a thriving activity in the AI acceleration segment, involving VC-funded startups as well as ‘big tech’. Some of the companies in the news over the last twelve months included Baidu, Syntiant, Groq, Tachyum, Triple-1, Perceive, Brainchip, Tenstorrent, LeapMind, Sony, InspireSemi, Graphcore, SimpleMachines, Cerebras, Ambient Scientific, Deep-AI, GSI Technology, Untether AI, Deep Vision, Innatera Nanosystems, Mythic, SambaNova. Many of these new chips are targeted at edge AI applications and therefore advertise their energy efficiency achievements. In terms of raw computing power at the datacenter, 2020 saw the introduction of Nvidia’s EGX A100 chip, a 54-billion transistors device. With the acquisition of Arm, in 2021 Nvidia could potentially come up with some new low-power edge AI solutions; if this happens, the event could have an impact on some of the above-mentioned AI acceleration startups.
Neural network research, of course, saw many advancements in 2020; hottest themes included energy savings and the use of analog technologies. Major AI events in 2020 included the development of GPT-3 language model by OpenAI.
Geopolitical tensions
Even though obscured by the pandemic and by giant acquisitions, the theme of geopolitical tensions affected 2020, too. Related announcements and events included the planned TSMC fab in Arizona; Huawei reportedly trying to convince Samsung and TSMC to build an advanced chip fab without using U.S. equipment; Risc-V International moving its headquarters to Switzerland; and the Trump administration adding Chinese foundry SMIC to a trade blacklist of companies. It will be interesting to see if this scenario will change in 2021 with the Biden presidency.
All eyes on Intel
Intel received a lot of attention in 2020, not just for the obvious reason of its size and importance, but also because of some weaknesses in the current competitive landscape. A well-known theme is Intel’s delay in moving to 7-nanometer processes; but analysts also pointed out some significant PPA shortcomings of the Intel processors compared to the Arm-based SoC internally developed by Apple. However, in 2020 Intel introduced a promising FET architecture, a NMOS-on-PMOS transistor built from multiple self-aligned stacked nanoribbons. It will be interesting to see if Intel in 2021 will be able to ‘strike back’ on both process geometries and PPA results.
Risc-V and open-source EDA tools
Risc-V had a great 2020, with a significant growth of deployment in new designs, a wider ecosystem and a wider application spectrum. The open-source movement advanced on the EDA front, too; for example, QuickLogic embraced a fully open-source suite of development tools for its FPGA devices and eFPGA technology.
Autonomous vehicles and car batteries
Lastly, a quick mention of something that did not happen in 2020. Not surprisingly, this year did not bring any major breakthroughs in the autonomous vehicle area, nor in car batteries. Even though there was no shortage of technological advancements, the road to deploying driverless cars at scale still looks very long. What we did see in 2020 was a growing momentum towards building a complete industry ecosystem and removing hurdles. Some facts include Synopsys joining the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium; Accellera forming a specific Working Group to create a standard in the functional safety lifecycle; the release of new standards, such as IEEE 2846 and UL 4600; developments in simulation platforms, such as the ones from AVSimulation and Foretellix; Samsung proposing a low-cost, single chip lidar.
No major breakthroughs in car batteries, either, at least in terms of real-world applications. Expectations are placed on the new batteries preannounced by Tesla, and also on specialized companies such as Enevate.
This concludes our quick recap of some of 2020 events and themes – as the world waits for vaccines, hoping to get back to normal in 2021.
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