Changes Post-Pandemic to the Semiconductor Industry in 2023 – ESD Alliance

By Bob Smith, Executive Director, ESD Alliance

Bob Smith

2023 promises to accelerate the changes already occurring in the post-pandemic semiconductor industry. Much of this is being driven by the shakeup of the global supply chain due to supply shortages and geo-political issues. As a result, many regions and countries are now committed to investing in their own domestic semiconductor capabilities.

The U.S. CHIPS Act, for example, should begin to roll out in 2023 to help accelerate innovation and manufacturing capability in the U.S. This is in addition to the private investments being made by leading semiconductor manufacturers to build significant new factories in the U.S. This represents a fundamental shift in thinking from the status quo of reliance on overseas manufacturing and offshore design centers.

As of 2021, the U.S. remains dominant in semiconductor design, but there are growing concerns that this may not be sustainable. Underlying both the investments being made in building domestic manufacturing plants and maintaining or increasing design activity is the critical need for building a workforce to support these activities.

In 2023, we will see increased focus on investments and industry efforts that prepare and educate the skilled workforce needed to support the growth of the U.S. domestic semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities. This includes the need to show that choosing a career in the semiconductor industry can be personally rewarding and challenging and requires just as much creativity (maybe more!) as other disciplines.

On the technology side, the growth of chiplet-based design will continue to accelerate in 2023 as more systems companies adopt the methodology. This presents new and ongoing opportunities for the EDA industry to develop technologies and solutions that can further automate the process of building and verifying systems based on chiplets, interconnect media and packages.

In 2023. expect to see more discussions about the protection of design IP during the design flow. This, along with safety and security, is a concern for two primary reasons. The first is the risk of design tampering where content is either changed or new content is added surreptitiously to the design database and the second is the concern over theft of design content. For many market segments such as medical electronics, autonomous driving and aerospace,  this is of growing concern for the potential liabilities that may be exposed.

Finally, we will see the open-source semiconductor design and manufacturing movement gain even more traction in 2023. Open–source is a viable and much better economic alternative for certain classes of designs. Perhaps even more important, it has the opportunity to become a key element of the workforce development effort as a way to provide hands-on, real-world experience to students and others who wish to join the semiconductor industry.

About Bob Smith

Bob Smith is Executive Director of the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community responsible for its management and operations. Smith began his career in high tech as an analog design engineer working at Hewlett Packard. Since then, he has spent more than 30 years in various roles in marketing, business development and executive management primarily working with startup and early-stage companies, including IKOS Systems, Synopsys, LogicVision and Magma Design Automation. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis and a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2023 at 4:17 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.