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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Ansys

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Real Intent

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.

Read the rest of Demand for Formal Verification Experts in 2023 – Axiomise

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Zuken

By Ansgar Hein, Chairman Board, SGET

Ansgar Hein

Even though we have gone through or are still going through various crises in recent years, from COVID to the war in Ukraine, the electronics industry will continue to grow in 2023. The Asian market will play a major role in this growth scenario, as this region is developing most dynamically and intensely. A key driver is the mobility megatrend, above all in the automotive sector through electromobility, with completely new business ideas accelerated by innovative ideas and solutions.

In my view, this is accompanied by other trends. In addition to the miniaturization of electrical engineering, this is, above all, an even stronger focus on sustainability, with the primary goal of reducing energy consumption and use of resources. And, of course, increasing connectivity, especially wireless and, if possible, with direct and universally available internet connectivity.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – SGET

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Breker

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Weebit

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Perforce

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Codasip

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry prediction – Agnisys