EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Breker

By Maheen Hamid, CFO & COO at Breker Verification Systems

Maheen Hamid

2023: Semiconductor Industry’s Exciting Year

Megatrends in remote working, growth of AI, growing demand for EV, increasing end applications requiring significant compute power, all contribute to the semiconductor industry needing to remain at the forefront of innovation and strategic agility. This is even more pronounced as geopolitical tensions define the need for competitive and comparative advantages across regions. As such, despite supply chain challenges marking the pandemic era, design innovation has accelerated, catalyzed by initiatives such as the CHIPS Act and increasing commercialization and implementation of the RISC-V ISA. The industry will continue to grow at an accelerated pace in the near future, if the right investments are made to manage the development cycle.

New applications and industry trends are unveiling new verification challenges. RISC-V developments require novel verification approaches as the legacy investment in verification for today’s commercial processors cannot be repeated seamlessly. Growth in chip complexity and increased heterogenous integration strategies, for example, chiplets, open doors to new efficacy standards for system verification. Greater investment in front end verification can also help manage risks for back-end issues in the supply chain. A shift left methodology is no longer a nice to have, but a mandatory requirement for competitive advantage.

Generating test content is a known bottleneck for the industry. We are seeing a significant uptick in synthesis for test content as part of this required shift left strategy. By farming verification knowledge as early in the process as possible – in a manner enabled by Breker solutions as an example – designers and verification engineers are exerting more control over the end-to-end process. The synthesis techniques, combined with improvements in specification level languages, is positively changing the ROI economics of reuse and number of re-spins.

2023 will be an exciting year for the semiconductor industry as it prepares itself to ride out the broader recessionary pressures with which we have entered the year. With growing needs for computing, the chip industry is somewhat insulated from the wild swings experienced by luxury goods or other consumer markets. The industry will continue to make smart investments so that it is positioned for unbridled growth as the world economies start to recover throughout the year.

About Author:

Maheen Hamid is the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at Breker Verification Systems

Category: EDA Predictions

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2023 at 2:06 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.