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.
