EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Bluespec

By Charlie Hauck, CEO, Bluespec Inc.

Charlie Hauck

The demand for custom silicon continues to rise. To meet this demand for greater design flexibility, companies are adopting silicon based on the open standard RISC-V architecture.

RISC-V is popular with developers for many reasons. Most notably, RISC-V’s popularity stems from its design freedom – allowing developers to tailor applications to their liking, thanks to its simplified base instruction set – and enables developers to avoid vendor lock-in. The collaborative ecosystem encourages developers to innovate alongside each other, spurring friendly competition which also encourages companies to push the boundaries of innovation.

In 2024, we expect to see RISC-V adoption grow more across vertical markets. While traditionally used to support embedded applications, RISC-V is now being used in applications in automotive, aerospace, consumer devices. We expect RISC-V will be used to support AI applications in the coming year as industries increase their use and reliance on advanced technologies. Generative AI applications, for example, require lots of computing power. RISC-V not only helps reduce the cost associated with running these applications, but efficiently does so compared to other architectures on the market. With Google leveraging RISC-V to support Android applications, we also expect to see more companies launching RISC-V-enabled gadgets like smartwatches.

Another area that will drive the growth of RISC-V is new hardware acceleration tools. The growth in not only generative AI but ML applications has increased the need for hardware acceleration. ASICs and FPGAs have become a primary choice for hardware acceleration because their performance per wattage and design allow them to accelerate tasks. Unlike GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs do not consume excessive amounts of power. The downside, however, is that they can be difficult and time consuming to program. To solve this issue, we will see developers leveraging High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools to trim the design process. With RISC-V being a preferred architecture among designers, we will see more hardware acceleration tools supporting RISC-V in 2024.

The SHD Group predicts that RISC-V will be found in 16 billion chips by 2030. As Fortune 500 and startup companies alike continue to leverage RISC-V architecture to develop innovative, one-of-a-kind offerings we believe RISC-V integration will far exceed expectation.

About Charlie Hauck:

Charlie Hauck is CEO at Bluespec Inc. and has more than 25 years of experience in research and development, engineering, marketing, and management within the semiconductor industry. Most recently, he was USA General Manager for Faraday Technology, a fabless application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vendor and silicon intellectual property (SIP) provider.

From 1998 to 2003, he served as Vice President of Engineering at Lexra Inc., a microprocessor SIP company. Before that, Charlie was director of ASIC development at LSI Logic where he was responsible for advanced ASIC technology and library development.

From 1987 to 1994, he was Director of IC Development at Kendall Square Research, managing the very large-scale integration (VLSI) design team responsible for delivering working silicon for its custom chips.

Charlie began his career at Commodore, where he completed several VLSI chips and boards for consumer electronics and DSP systems.

Charlie holds a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Category: Predictions

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2024 at 10:07 am. 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.