EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Weebit

By Coby Hanoch, CEO, Weebit Nano

Coby Hanoch

1. Increased localization of semiconductor production
Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen unprecedented investment in semiconductor R&D and production around the world. Such investments take time to mature into actual fab capacities. According to SEMI, 57 new fabs began construction in 2020, 2021 and 2022 combined. In 2023, we will begin to see some of the earliest of these investments start to be realized, and despite economic headwinds, we will see continued public and private investments in semiconductor production in the coming year. All this spells opportunity for companies that are supplying technologies for advanced SoCs, including EDA tools, manufacturing equipment, and embedded technologies like Weebit’s ReRAM Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) IP.

2. More mixed-signal integration
   Historically, analog/mixed-signal designs are manufactured in older process geometries than digital designs (such as 130nm and 180nm), but with power and cost pressures increasing, some of these designs are moving to more advanced nodes, where further logic/memory integration is a possibility. In 2023, we will see this move toward increased integration accelerate in areas such as power management ICs (PMICs), audio amplifier ICs and other high-voltage designs for consumer, automotive, industrial, telecom, and medical applications. Integrating high-voltage devices with logic gates and NVM on a single die in 65nm-40nm in a BCD process can help reduce power consumption and increase performance.

3. MCUs scale downward
   Microcontrollers for applications such as automotive, battery operated IoT devices and smart cards, among others, must support increasingly sophisticated programming to fulfill consumer demand for ever more functionality and richer features. At the same time, for cost and power reasons, such designs must scale towards smaller process nodes, ultimately 28nm and 22nm. These devices need NVM that not only has the requisite performance-power-cost but can also scale to such process nodes. Designers can reduce costs and power and increase system speed and security by eliminating external memory components.

4. Embedded flash hits the scaling wall
   As we see this increasing demand for embedded NVM to support integration at advanced nodes, flash is hitting a wall in terms of its ability to scale. Even with 3D stacking, advanced packaging and chiplet architectures, there are significant cost, power, and security difficulties to overcome. For most applications, it’s just not economically feasible to embed flash into SoCs beyond 28nm. Flash also has limitations in terms of performance, reliability, power consumption and cost. Due to flash’s integration challenges, in 2023 we will see more companies looking for alternative NVM solutions.

5. Emerging NVMs step in to replace embedded flash
   As we enter 2023, the industry is increasingly looking to emerging NVMs like Resistive RAM (ReRAM), Phase Change Memory (PCM), Magneto Resistive RAM (MRAM), and Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) which offer alternatives to flash and can scale more easily to advanced geometries. Each of these technologies has its advantages and drawbacks in cost, complexity, power, performance, and other parameters. ReRAM offers the best balance across these factors for a broad range of applications.

New fabs that don’t have legacy flash technology, especially more advanced fabs, can easily transition to using a new NVM technology. This is especially true when the NVM is integrated at the back-end-of-line (BEOL) like ReRAM. This means it can be adopted once per node and then it will work for all variants of that node, unlike flash which is integrated at the front-end-of-line (FEOL) and needs to be adapted to each variant of a node.

ReRAM technologies will start to enter the mainstream in 2023. We’ve already seen announcements from companies like TSMC and Infineon who are bringing ReRAM to market for automotive designs. At Weebit Nano, we are working with multiple partners at different process nodes to bring our ReRAM IP to SoC designers for a broad range of applications. Our first ReRAM embedded IP is now available at SkyWater Technology in its 130nm CMOS process. Weebit ReRAM is fully functional, industry-qualified and ready for production. Importantly, it’s able to deliver the promised advantages in terms of cost, power, endurance and reliability.

Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2023 at 4:51 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.