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.

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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.

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By Simon Butler, General Manager, Perforce

Simon Butler

Supply chain issues will work out of the system, including legacy analog processes used in automotive and other non data-center applications. A semiconductor over supply scenario is likely, especially for high volume and commodity parts (memory components are already making production cutbacks).

There will be more manufacturing activity in the US mostly around fab plant design and engineering; we won’t see actual wafers for another two years as the factories complete construction and begin to staff up. Expect more investigation into other aspects of the manufacturing process that could be bought back to the US: Testing, packaging, etc., and how much of these activities lend themselves to automation given that US labor is more expensive.

I expect to see an uptick in IP-centric based design, including IPs at the die level as part of chiplet based designs. These will require new platforms to handle the assembly and to secure the provenance of the constituent components. Expect aggregating IP catalogs that span multiple vendors and technologies, and with block chain style authentication and traceability to ensure what is being assembled is what is expected.

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By Rupert Baines, CMO, Codasip:

Rupert Baines

The ‘immutable’ laws are broken. 2023 offers a new era of custom compute. That or ruin.

After a few years of ‘catch up’, the world’s largest economies were left reeling from the pandemic impacts of 2020-22. The global economy overall is not in the greatest shape with geopolitics stifling national economies and throttling global trade routes. This is on top of the normal boom and bust cycle. The impact is inevitably felt in the semiconductor industry which had to manage an initial panic over supplies, before consumer demand scaled back and left many with excess inventories. Having said that, for the last two years, the industry has still seen growth. The industry forecasts for this year are not so bright, however.

But in spite of questions over industry forecasts for 2023, there are big opportunities for companies with strong foundations, and clear strategic direction that focus on helping their customers differentiate themselves. Some of this is, quite literally, about being in the right place at the right time.

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By Anupam Bakshi, CEO, Agnisys

Anupam Bakshi

The trends that I talked about in my 2020 Predictions  will continue with even more vigor.

Automatic generation of the RTL design will continue beyond the hardware-software interface (HSI) layer. It will encompass a whole custom IP, enabling users to generate much of their design directly from their specifications. The generation process will include high-quality documentation suitable for inclusion in user manuals.

The range of available standard IP will continue to grow, with many configuration and customization options. Automated integration of both standard and custom IP to build subsystems and a complete SoC will expand to include all aspects of SoC creation. The generated RTL designs will include custom and standard bus interfaces, functional safety mechanisms to detect and correct errors, and clock domain crossing (CDC) logic.

Automatic verification will continue to include not only testbench generation but test generation as well, plus generation of assertions for use in both simulation and formal verification. Generated C/C++ code will be used by programmers to develop and test their embedded code and device drivers.

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By Khaled Maalej, CEO, VSORA

Semiconductor Industry Innovation Steams Ahead in 2023

Khalid Maalej

Due to a combination of events, the technology equity market suffered a steep drop in 2022. Some of those events were unrelated, including the COVID pandemic and the war in Ukraine. Others were triggered by policy decisions such as containment of China by the U.S. that disrupted the semiconductor supply chain and unbalanced the production of chips.

While I think the technology stock market hit bottom, predicting the market for the year ahead is like reading the future from tea leaves. Still, early signs indicate that the Chip Act approved by the U.S. congress and signed into law by President Biden is prompting the private industry to invest heavily in semiconductors. One obvious example is the construction of new fabs in U.S. and Europe. All considered, I predict that the stock market in 2023 will see an inversion and begin to rise again, more likely in the second half of the year.

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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.

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By Michiel Ligthart, President and COO, Verific Design Automation

2023 Will be the Year of Bespoke EDA

Michiel Ligthart 

If 2022 was the year of bespoke silicon, formerly known as custom silicon, then it naturally follows that 2023 will be the year of bespoke EDA (electronic design automation). And like bespoke silicon, bespoke EDA is not a one size fits all methodology.

Bespoke silicon relies on bespoke EDA, a fine-tuned and tailored design flow that starts at the register transfer level (RTL) where tweaks can be made to improve the quality of a bespoken silicon design. Enhancing the flow at design entry and in-house EDA tools using domain knowledge is attractive to engineering groups because it offers them the ability to support a wide varieties of design styles as well as standards such as SystemVerilog, VHDL, UVM, UPF, and encryption. Without standards to move design content through different EDA tools, bespoke EDA would be impractical and impossible to implement. One productive advantage of bespoke EDA: Engineers need only one API for SystemVerilog and VHDL thanks to its building blocks.

Examples of bespoke EDA implementations are elusive, even though it’s common knowledge that silicon design teams are popularizing it. Then again, it’s a competitive distinction not shared outside of silicon design groups. Some educated guesses could be low-power design, design for test circuitry, intellectual property (IP) customization, and debug functionality.

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By Sanjay Bali, VP of Strategy and Product Management, Synopsys EDA Group

2022 was a big year for the electronics industry. From the continued growth of AI (both in end devices and in chip design itself) to the emergence of more ways to design in the cloud, the level of innovation we saw was impressive. And it was necessary, as we experienced how complex semiconductors have become, with engineers striving to meet the progressively challenging task of optimizing power, performance, and area (PPA) in chips with as many as trillions of transistors.

In addition to systemic and scale complexity, a variety of other challenges were laid bare, from cyclical swings in product demand to a shrinking pool of engineering talent to the growing impact of all this energy consumption on our planet. Given this backdrop, what might 2023 bring to this increasingly vital industry?

For decades we have seen how engineering ingenuity has persevered to extend Moore’s law and extract more computing power from a single chip—in spite of the limitations of physics. To create products like autonomous cars and advanced robotics. Ahead of us, we see the market demanding more sophisticated features from chip technologies that power our world.

In 2023, we can expect to see these trends continue to unfold, with a few emerging technologies taking hold to further shape the industry. Read on to learn about three key technologies that are poised to transform electronic design.

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