By Sowmyan Rajagopalan, CEO, Thalia Design Automation

Sowmyan Rajagopalan

The economic outlook for semiconductor industry in 2023

Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, the global market for semiconductors has not looked very stable. It has made long-term planning tough if not impossible. A forecast fall then turned into a rapid growth, followed by an oversupply problem with excess inventories. In 2021, more than $0.5 trillion units were shipped, which was a record, and represented a significant 26.2% growth in value over 2020.

That growth continued into 2022, with semiconductor industry growing at 7.3%. So what’s coming further down the track?

Due to an oversupply issue and slower demand in consumer electronics, Gartner’s forecast for 2023 is a small decline in the market by 2.5%. Even with that modest decline, we are still looking at a staggering $620 billion semiconductor market this year.

However, the market for automotive electronics continues to evolve to support the rapidly increasing volume of devices in the modern vehicle: from non-critical systems in audio, video, satellite navigation and connectivity devices, to fundamental systems in battery control, and mission critical Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and monitoring systems. Although analysts’ numbers differ, the forecasts for the growth of automotive electronics all show a similar and definite upward trajectory. The automotive industry could be a driving force for the industry – potentially leading the direction of consumer electronics with the largest tier one companies sourcing directly from foundries: changing the power balance and upsetting the decades-old structure of a tiered supply chain in automotive manufacturing.

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By Kella Knack, Senior Director of Strategic Marketing, Avishtech

Kella Knack

2023: The Year of Refining the Role of EDA Toolsets

One year ago, as an industry as well as a country and world, we were dealing with the remnants of COVID-19 and its resultant effects on business. Those efforts centered on a variety of global issues—fabrication facilities having limited manufacturing staffs and production capabilities; “rolling” shut downs of various facilities; materials shortages; shipping capabilities and cost, and most impactful, the global chip shortage.

The “Sort of” Cloudy Crystal Ball for ‘23

As we move towards the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023, we are still challenged by on-going global chip shortages. And, there are also two more significant wrinkles:

• The war in the Ukraine (which has significantly reduced our arsenal of support equipment).
• The ongoing/growing concern about China’s potential takeover of Taiwan that could compromise our access to crucial electronic manufacturing facilities.

There are some silver linings resulting from the foregoing: new defense contracts the likes of which we have not seen in a long time and U.S.-based chip manufacturing operations that will help to address the global chip shortage and relieve our strong dependency on Taiwanese manufacturing operations.

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By Dr. Amin Shokrollhi, Founder and CEO, Kandou

Dr. Amin Shokrollhi

Plentiful Technological Innovation for 2023

I’m optimistic about the plentiful technological innovation coming in 2023 and foresee a positive outlook for the semiconductor industry. We can expect some of those advances coming from the automotive and IoT segments thanks to the rapid advancements with artificial intelligence and machine learning.

The USB and PCIe markets should offer up some innovation, news and new USB technology as well as consumers and hyperscalers demand higher bandwidth, faster speed and reliable access. It seems high-speed, energy-efficient chip-to-chip link solutions to improve the way the world connects and communicates has never been more important and the semiconductor industry is responding.

From a more global perspective, the U.S. took a leadership role with the signing of the CHIP Act in 2022, a great benefit to for semiconductor. That said, the ongoing conflicts throughout the world could unsettle semiconductor industry a bit in 2023, some markets will suffer and consumer-side spending could be reduced.

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By Intento Team

Although chip shortage seems mostly to be behind us, the current economic situation, aggravated by inflation and energy crisis, continues to bring uncertainty to the semiconductor market. Disturbing geopolitical picture due to the war in Ukraine and US-China chip ban battle are shifting our focus to attempts to overcome the divisions instead of jointly working on finding the solutions for the benefit of us all and our planet which is still our only home.

Nevertheless, the demand for new analog and mixed signal circuits remains strong, driven by strong growth markets such as electric vehicles and energy transition in general, even with slowdown in investments observed towards the end of the year.

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By Bastien Gratréaux, Project and MARCOM Lead, Defacto Technologies

Bastien Gratréaux

During the past few years, we observed that SoC Design should be oriented to be seen as a commodity. A strong demand around SoC compilation is occurring in particular at front-end level. Several major semiconductor companies confirmed that the first versions of SoC should be available “at the glance”. New actors (mainly from software world) start to appear in the market and are part of such new need in terms of press button SoC generation. The strongest need is the ease of access and use of EDA tools so we keep believing that the trend from 2023 will be oriented around the cloud and even if we talk about this for now several years.

To reach such automation and accelerating the process of SoC creation requires that EDA design tools provide a much higher degree of automation to manage design information very early in the design process and at Defacto, we believe it requires a unique and new breakthrough methodology to manage unified design formats. Indeed, all design information, including functional design (RTL), architecture (IP-XACT), timing constraints (SDC), power intent (UPF), physical (LEF/DEF), must be taken into consideration together and as early as possible in the SoC build process.

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By Gary Campbell, EVP Central Engineering, Arm

Gary Campbell

In the coming year, we will see a renewed focus on computing power, energy and thermal efficiencies. We’re already seeing this shift to power and energy savings in the infrastructure markets, particularly data centers, and expect this to continue in 2023 with increasing momentum behind performance efficiency.

The role of applications in redefining the user experience will also accelerate, with performance metrics built around the application experience as part of a wider industry push for ‘real-world performance’. The combination of efficiency and performance, not just performance alone, will define future benchmarks.

Whereas 2022 was a year of consolidation, I expect 2023 to be one of innovation. The ground was laid in previous years by providing the ecosystem with the tools to get creative and provide even more compelling experiences on current and future technologies. Mobile gaming is a great example, with ray tracing features on mobile expected to drive ultra-realistic gaming experiences.

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By Rich Goldman, Director Product Marketing, Ansys

Rich Goldman

Taking a moment to look back at 2022 reveals a year full of surprises, a year difficult to predict. 2022 opened as the year of 3D-IC, Bespoke Silicon and AI-enabled IC design and ended as AI astounded us all in the ’person’ of ChatGPT. In between, Intel became a foundry, ARM sued one of their largest customers, and semiconductors went from extreme shortages to glut. (We used to call that boom to bust, or undercapacity to oversupply.) And perhaps most of all, the tragic war in Ukraine affected us all and the global economy in unforeseen ways.

2022 was an unpredictable year. 2023 is setting up to be just as unpredictable, but we can rather confidently project trends from 2022, and make some less likely predictions.

Bespoke silicon will explode in 2023, as the 2022 pioneers press their advantage, and 3D-IC becomes available to more systems companies. The advantages of bespoke silicon as delivered in optimized end systems are becoming clear to everyone, driving the technique toward the mainstream. 3D-IC is the enabler, and as foundries make this technology more widely available, bespoke silicon will become more the norm. Classic semiconductor companies will team with systems companies to develop their own bespoke silicon.

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By Prakash Narain, President & CEO, Real Intent

Prakash Narain

Functional verification will become increasingly critical in chip and SoC design methodologies, with the three traditional workhorses for early functional verification — simulation, formal verification, and static sign-off — all extensively deployed.

Functional verification will continue its shift left. To help achieve this, static sign-off technologies must ensure adherence to specific methodology rules designed to further reduce complexity. For example, the connectivity and glitch sign-off domain has rules for early verification of block abutment for more efficient physical design. Additionally, new failure modes requiring static sign-off will emerge, due to the continuing increase in design complexity. In addition to clock domain crossing, and reset domain crossing sign-off, we will be seeing more design initialization and low-power sign-off.

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By Dr. Ashish Darbari, Founder and CEO, Axiomise

Dr. Ashish Darbari

Previously, functional verification was the biggest challenge. Security and functional safety now dominate concerns and will do so in 2023, especially as the hardware footprint continues to increase in AI/ML, GPUs, networking, HPC, RISC-V, 5G, automotive, IoT, edge computing, and meta-verse.

While each domain brings a differentiated set of verification challenges, at the core, every domain needs functional correctness, safety, and security verification. AI/ML and 5G designs are predominantly data transformation intensive and rely on software requirements to drive optimizations in hardware. The software use model is not mature yet in comparison to classic processors that run on well-defined operating systems and software. 5G designs, in particular, need to be tested for multiple configurations, reliability and QoS and performance.

As our industry is slowing down due to the global recession, it becomes even more important to be efficient and effective at what we do. That includes test and verification of systems, including hardware.

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By Bob Potock, VP Marketing, Zuken USA

Bob Potock

Do you find it hard to keep up with all the activity around product development? Technology related to AI, cloud storage, cloud computing, digital engineering, smart manufacturing, and model-based design is moving fast. It feels as if the product development process is evolving more quickly than ever, and 2023 will be exciting. When looking ahead to expectations for 2023, let’s take a deeper look at digital engineering, cloud applications, and manufacturing.

Digital Engineering Adoption is Slow

The digital transformation, and more specifically, digital engineering, introduces a shift in methodology from a document-based design process to a model-based design process. A process that can help engineers avoid the pitfalls and consequences of poor design. A model-based design process shifts the critical steps from design, build, and test, to design, analyze, and build with verification all along the way. The model versus document approach provides a much more rigorous product description that includes safety protocols and environmental requirements.

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