EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – CAST

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.

• Consolidation in the IP industry will continue, but there will always be room for newcomers and disruptive forces.
  Merger and acquisition activity in the IP industry has been significant. But unlike the EDA industry, I don’t think that IP is likely to become dominated by 3–4 giant firms. System designers can create complex chips with just one or two dozen EDA tools, but they typically need hundreds of IP cores. These cores are continually evolving, and new cores are required to keep up with advances in process technology, new standards and specifications, and the demand for greater functionality. This creates ongoing opportunities for new and smaller IP firms to innovate and develop quicker and hence capture market share. The need for supplier base diversity will also continue to work in favor of smaller and new vendors: no IP buyer wants to rely on a single firm for all their EDA and their IP, as this increases risk, reduces negotiation power, and limits the ability to differentiate products.
• Political uncertainty may slow growth and will probably shift the silicon globe’s center of gravity toward the West.
  The impact of the pandemic on supply chains and increases in geopolitical tensions around the world are affecting every aspect of the global economy, including the health of the semiconductor industry. In response, companies — and countries — are taking steps towards greater independence from third-party semiconductor suppliers. Large American and European companies are working to reduce risk by gaining greater control over their product cycles, and the Chips Acts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are fueling these changes. I don’t think these actions will significantly slow down the semiconductor industry, but they will result in a gradual shift of the industry’s center of gravity away from the East and towards the European and North American continents. The intensity of this shift remains to be seen; a lot depends on the hard-to-predict evolution of the geopolitical landscape.

About Author:

Dr. Nikos Zervas is a semiconductor IP executive with hands-on experience in IP core development, support, marketing, and sales. Nikos joined CAST in 2010 and has been the company’s CEO since 2015. Before CAST, he co-founded image/video compression developer Alma Technologies, where he served as chairman and CEO for nine years.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 25th, 2023 at 6:00 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.