By Jim Garstka, VP Sales & Business Development, Plasma-Therm

Jim Garstka

 Global Digitalization Will Drive Market Demand

The coming year will prove to be another exciting period of technological advances in the semiconductor industry, as our daily lives continue to become more digitized. Consumer applications that will continue to grow in 2023 include electric and autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and hyperscale data centers – all of which have driven growth the past few years and are expected to accelerate in the coming year as market demand rises.

So, what is driving the advances that are making these consumer applications more affordable, effective and power-efficient? Wide-bandgap compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and gallium oxide (Ga₂O₃) are some of the critical materials behind these emerging technologies. These materials are essential to the growing power device market – which is forecasted to grow at a rapid compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 34% between now and 2027, according to the Yole Group’s Power SiC 2022 report. This bodes well for Plasma-Therm and other equipment providers with proven expertise in providing solutions for these materials, including our broad offering of etch, thin-film deposition and rapid thermal processing products. Chip manufacturers will increasingly need to work with suppliers who have the tool and material expertise to optimize processes that produce high-performance, energy-efficient chips, and we expect 2023 to be another banner year in these high-growth specialty markets.

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By Burnie Wu, VP of Business Development, MemVerge

Burnie Wu

Our company and area of specialization with respect to EDA workloads entails applying memory virtualization and transparent checkpointing of unmodified EDA applications to achieve operational cost savings and/or performance improvements. Hence, our specific predictions for 2023 are based on our unique vantage point into the EDA industry.

• EDA users will continue seeking to migrate workloads to public clouds. At the same time, they will be seeking ways to reduce cloud computing costs through increased use of public spot instances.
• The first generation of CXL memory-enabled x86 servers will begin shipping and be qualified for use with memory-bound EDA workloads. This will lift some of the capacity and bandwidth constraints for EDA applications and improve runtimes.
• Interest in transparent checking pointing/recovery (including rollback) of running EDA applications will grow as implementations mature and more use cases for improving productivity and efficiency are validated by both system administrators and users.

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By Koen Verhaege, CEO, Sofics

Koen Verhaege

Two different perspectives

In 2022, the pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC, SMIC …), collectively have produced more wafers than 100% of their wafer capacity (per the GSA) – and at the same time wafer prices have gone up significantly too. Foundries gear up for 2024 – according to SEMI, collectively they are spending north of $500B to build new fabs. EU and US governments launch previously unseen subsidy budgets for semiconductors.

But purchase manager indices show a negative trend as we leave 2022 behind us (J.P.Morgan). Inflation, at least in Europe, is higher than ever since 2007 – that’s when the #iphone was first introduced. The consumer’s consumption power is reduced (unless you work in Belgium, where salaries are automatically adjusted about 11% coming January – must be the only country in the world, but let me know if we are mistaken).

These are 2 perspectives that seem to clash, yet we do live in one world, one reality. So how does this all add up? Or better how do we resolve this? We will be happy to read your comments.

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By Dr. Nikos Zervas, CEO, CAST

Dr. Nikos Zervas

As we enter a new year — CAST’s thirtieth in operation — we are experiencing a more robust semiconductor IP market than ever before. I see three distinct industry trends shaping that market in 2023.

• The Semiconductor IP market will continue to grow.
  From autonomous vehicles to augmented reality to data centers, multiple markets are driving the need for more capable systems that can only be built using new and more advanced semiconductor chips. Today’s multi-billion transistor Systems on a Chip (SoCs) that fuel the evolution of these markets just can’t be effectively and timely designed and produced without reusable IP cores. This necessity creates a growing demand that IP providers will continue to serve.

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By Frank Schirrmeister, Vice President, Arteris

Frank Schirrmeister

What Will Be The Driving Trends For 2023?

Across the board, we will see an increasing demand for higher performance and power efficiency. As the demand for computing power continues to grow from data centers to network and device edges, there is a need for more efficient and powerful semiconductor devices. This trend will further drive the development of new materials, designs, and manufacturing processes to deliver better performance and lower power consumption. Semiconductor IP will face increased scrutiny to meet stringent low-power demands, further increasing the pressure to optimize the power contribution of NoCs by reducing wires, registers, and NoC base components like switches.

We will see a further bifurcation between more complex and integrated device architectures at the high-end computing domain and the lower complexity for sensor endpoints that require much more power-aware devices and advanced mixed-signal developments. More integrated and sophisticated device architectures may require integrating multiple components, such as sensors, processors, and memory, onto a single chip. From a network-on-chip (NoC) perspective, at the high end, we will see hierarchies involving 10s of interconnect areas with a mix of cache-coherent and non-cache-coherent NoCs, with the number of initiators and targets per NoC further growing. But even for smaller designs at the sensor and device edges, NoCs will increasingly become the standard over custom manual interconnects and bus structures.

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By Christian Eder, Product Marketing Director, congatec

Christian Eder

COM-HPC Mini ushers in a new era

Coming at last: Design sprints from COM Express Compact to COM-HPC

The first COM-HPC Mini Computer-on-Modules will soon hit the market. The final ratification of the new COM-HPC Mini standard, expected for the first half of 2023, will solve the Gordian knot that developers of ultra-compact COM Express Basic systems have been facing.

Once available, COM-HPC Mini modules with 13th generation Intel Core processors (codename Raptor Lake) will complete the ecosystem open to developers of third generation modular high-end embedded and edge applications. An ecosystem which ranges from high-end Server-on-Modules to extremely compact Client-on-Modules that are barely larger than a credit card. Even the most space-constrained COM Express Compact and COM Express Mini solutions can benefit from a high-end performance boost and a significantly larger number of new high-speed interfaces provided from COM-HPC Mini. Thus, entire product families can migrate to the new PICMG standard – without requiring significant modification of the internal system design and housing despite the larger module and carrier board dimensions.

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2023 V2X forecast By Autotalks

Before the forecast for 2023 is provided, it’s time to revisit the 2022 forecast. The first prediction about increased attention to V2X in two-wheelers was spot on. The unique value of using V2X to protect eBikes and eScooters was demonstrated and promoted. The second prediction about the market being quick to embrace cooperative perception didn’t materialize. The reason is the market’s focus on the launch of the basic Day1 V2X instead of the research of Day2 V2X. A prediction I should have made in 2022 is the start of deployment of V2X services along German roads including the Autobahn.

The forecast for 2023 is derived from two expected major milestones. First, EuroNCAP is expected to publish the test protocol for V2X for the 2026 safety ratings. With that, vehicles implementing V2X will be rewarded. Second, the FCC will publish the second Report & Order (R&O) containing C-V2X spectrum regulation in the US.

Those milestones will trigger V2X deployments in Europe and the US. In Europe, many carmakers (OEMs) are waiting for the release of the 2026 updated grading. Following that, their calculations will show that V2X deployment is the cheapest way to increase the vehicle safety rating. As a result, the V2X market launch will be accelerated.

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By Michiel Ligthart, President and COO, Verific Design Automation

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 Amy Fowler, VP and GM of the FlashBlade BU, Pure Storage.

Amy Fowler

Organizations Will Prioritize AI/ML Expertise, but Finding IT Talent Won’t be Easy: To truly take advantage of AI is a long journey; one that will continue to be bottlenecked by a lack of IT talent. Organizations need data scientists, people who are technically capable and cognizant of AI/ML technologies, however labor market shortages have caused them to pull back on growth plans. While layoffs may continue in 2023, organizations will hold onto the technologists working in areas of AI/ML that have the ability to provide far-reaching benefits in the future.

Growth of Machine-Generated Data: While spending may slow down amid a recession, data generation will not. In 2023, more companies will use machine-generated or synthetic data to help train their AI models. One of the advantages of this type of data is the ability to be generated with the precision that data scientists need, saving time and eliminating bottlenecks in the training process such as data sanitization needed for human-derived data. This path will generate more data that can be used to feed their AI training engines faster, consequently creating more demand for fast data storage.

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By Javier Perez, Chief Open Source Evangelist, Perforce

Javier Perez

Every time a newly disclosed critical open source vulnerability or supply chain attack hits the headlines, teams sound the alarms for greater security. But vulnerabilities have and always will occur because software and those who develop it aren’t perfect. One year after the zero-day Log4j vulnerability and exploits, we’ve seen the industry rally behind awareness and educating organizations on open source security and advocating for checks and balances for secure software development life cycles. Alongside this push within the private sector, we can expect more government-led initiatives to launch in the new year, like the guidance from the U.S. White House’s Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity executive order and the Open Source Software Security Mobilization 10-point plan which are driving awareness and responsibilities for all U.S. government agencies. At the same time, the 10-stream mobilization plan is going to start delivering results on the improvement of open source security. In 2023, it will remain critical for organizations to improve their open source security best practices, while being transparent and actively disclose vulnerabilities—something that we should view as positive.

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