Artificial intelligence, Moore’s law, chiplets, and High NA EUV were among the themes discussed by keynoters and panelists at the two industry events, both held in San Francisco from July 9-10 to July 13
Thousands of industry professionals and academic researchers involved in all different aspects of the semiconductor ecosystem gathered in San Francisco last week – either as attendees, exhibitors, presenters, or speakers – for the 2023 editions of the Design Automation Conference and Semicon West. Back to normal after the pandemic, the two co-located events offered a rich menu to the semiconductor community – combining research papers, exhibition floors, keynotes and panels. Adding to this offering, Semicon West was also co-located with the Flex event, and two European semiconductor research institutes – Belgium’s imec and France’s CEA-Leti – also organized their own forums at venues nearby (ITF Semicon USA and Leti Semicon Workshop, respectively). Here we will try to summarize some of the concepts that emerged from some of the keynotes and panels.
EDA: no disruptions ahead
Let’s start with EDA. Overall, it looks like the industry is not expecting any major disruptions on the short term. Artificial intelligence will obviously continue to play a key role in the evolution of EDA tools, but today this can be taken for granted and cannot be considered a new trend anymore. Part of the debate about EDA concerned the adaptation of existing EDA tools to the change of external conditions, such as the advent of cloud computing. The lack of disruptive innovations was effectively summarized by a rather provocative questions asked by Prit Banerjee, Ansys’ CTO, to EDA veterans Joe Costello and Wally Rhines during a panel. In short, Banerjee – speaking from the audience, not as a panelist – maintained that until now the major EDA vendors have just “tweaked” their EDA tools to adapt them to new technologies – such as parallel processing, AI, cloud computing – and asked if there is now space for a new EDA flow that is natively optimized for those new resources. Joe Costello answered that it’s a great idea, but today it would be difficult to find the money to undertake such an effort.
