EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Menta

By Yoan Dupret , Managing Director and CTO, Menta

Yoan Dupret

‘A Paradigm Shift: Universally Adaptive and Resilient Compute at the Edge’

In 2022, I began my predictions column talking about the aftershocks of COVID-19 and growing east-west geopolitical tensions. Since, then, the number and severity of events affecting the semiconductor industry has exploded. Geopolitical tensions became war, in both Ukraine and Israel, and  also a new cold war as explained in the Financial Times 2022 book of the year Chip War by Chris Miller. While China has injected more money in its semiconductor industry, Europe, Japan and USA have all engaged in their own Chip Acts.

While the semiconductor industry has been fueling the world innovations and advancements for the last 60 years, it is only now that nations and the general public starts to understand its importance. In other words, people now understand dominance in the semiconductor realm has a direct correlation to which region really drives global innovation.

At the same time, humanity has started to understand the marvels of AI. ChatGPT has been the focus of attention, not only within the likes of Big Bang Theory characters geeky minded folks, but with everyone, from politicians, to medical doctors, to students, book authors, artists, and the international media.

Let’s also not forget quantum computing; investments here have reached levels never seen before and it will not be long before we see real life usage of quantum computers capabilities that will, fundamentally change our understanding of issues such as climate change or enable individually targeted drug therapies to cure diseases.

Several profound revolutions are on their way, and the semiconductor industry is at the heart of all of them.

Combine geopolitical uncertainties, uncertainty of technology requirements, and add investment on top of it and you get more demand for a more adaptive and resilient semiconductor industry.

During last year’s predictions, I explained how embedded FPGA can address these requirements of adaptive and resilient computing at the Edge and Extreme Edge. Embedded FPGAs bring all the benefits of traditional FPGAs – as the hardware can be recoded to perform any digital function, post-production and an infinite number of times – but embedded within the ASIC/SoC with the traditional benefits in terms of power consumption and high-volume cost.

Since December 2022, Menta eFPGA IP has been available as silicon-proven soft IP, meaning IP can be provided on any Foundry and technology node, fitted to the product requirements in terms of power, performances and area and completely handled by our customers and partners. As predicted, and combined with Origami Programmer, our self-contained, easy to use software development tool, that can be integrated as an API into customers SDK, it has accelerated the adoption of our eFPGA IP. Menta eFPGA IPs are now used all over the world to allow chips to adapt to nation-dependent cryptography requirements, be future-proofed to post-quantum cryptography, evolve with AI algorithms, or follow evolving industrial interface trends.

This however is not the only revolution we are bringing to the market.

Adaptive and resilient computing at the Edge can go one step further when you consider the chiplets angle. As of today, chiplets have been a solution for massive chips to be able to integrate more functions in one chip and strongly improve the yield by splitting massive chips in smaller, application-specific chiplets into a package to address the specific needs at data centers, cloud, high performance computing, networking and many others.

What about Edge computing? The well-known requirements of cost and power consumption have not changed. Additionally, Edge computing is not only processing power, memories, accelerators and interfaces – it can include an increasing variety of functions, including analog and RF. With the support of the French Government, and a variety of industrial board members, we will soon propose a universal chiplet platform, called MOSAICS-LP, that will broaden the number of companies able to design their own chips.

Our mission remains the same: facilitate Adaptive and Resilient Compute at The Edge and Extreme Edge and allow our customers to navigate through uncertainties and rapid changes.

Yoan is the Managing Director and CTO of Menta – a leader in embedded FPGA IP cores for chips and smart sensors. Prior to his position at Menta, he held various managerial and technical positions at DelfMEMS, Samsung, CSR, Infineon and Altis Semiconductor. Yoan holds a PhD from Supelec (France) and an Engineering degree (MSEE) from ESEO (France).

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 18th, 2024 at 1:51 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.