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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Bluespec

By Dr. Lucio Lanza, Managing Director, Lanza tech Ventures

2024 Ushers in the Democratization of Silicon

Dr. Lucio Lanza

The democratization of silicon will become a reality in 2024 as the pieces for its success fall into place. Availability of open-source resources such as the RISC-V ISA and an open-source community-based platform where free design tools and the methodology for a complete design flow are making silicon design more cost effective and readily accessible. And within reach to thousands and thousands of hardware designers or would be hardware designers, helping address the demand for new designs and the acute engineering shortage.

Design guides, how-to webinars and other support resources are also freely available to help train new recruits into the world of semiconductor design. The cost of prototyping in reasonably advanced silicon nodes will be cut down by a factor of 100. Being at a node that is not the absolute most advanced is not a big weakness any longer. And availability of U.S.-based fabs like GlobalFoundries and Skywater Technologies with viable process technologies offering the manufacturing of silicon far less expensive than the traditional silicon design and manufacturing route.
Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Lanza

By Robert Smith,  Commercial Director at PRFI

What major technological advancements or innovations do you foresee occurring in your industry in 2024, and how do you plan to adapt or lead in these areas?

Robert Smith

In the RF compound semiconductor industry we are seeing increasing levels of integration of different semiconductor technologies onto the same process, such as pHEMTs, HBTs and PIN diodes. This offers new opportunities for innovative levels of functionality. PRFI has experience with most of the major foundries and can select the most appropriate process or technology for a specific application, taking into account all the technical, commercial, and supply chain considerations.

We also see a continuation of the trend towards packaging high-power PAs into SMT packages to drive down costs and allow the use of standard PCB assembly reflow processes. PRFI has extensive knowledge of the design, simulation, and evaluation of various packaging technologies.

How do you predict consumer behaviour and market trends will evolve in 2024, and what strategies are you implementing to meet these changing demands?

We think the focus will be on ubiquity of coverage and reliability rather than the emergence of a new ‘killer’ application to drive increased capacity. To facilitate this, PRFI is working with partners in the satcom industry to design ICs that enable LEO satellite constellations for near-ubiquitous coverage.

We continue to see growth in requirements for high-power solid-state power amplifiers, as GaN technology steadily replaces tubes in a range of RF and microwave applications. We see this trend continuing through 2024 and beyond.
Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – PRFI

By Charbel Rizk, PhD., Founder and CEO, Oculi

Charbel Rizk

Technological Innovations:

1. What major technological advancements or innovations do you foresee occurring in your industry in 2024?

In 2024 we foresee an increased demand for visual intelligence at the edge. The term smart sensor has been overused in previous years to mean adding or extracting some intelligence after the image has been captured, stored, or transmitted off the image sensor. While the result may indeed derive some intelligence, it is a highly inefficient process which is slow, power hungry, and expensive if the industry continues with the traditional dumb image sensor. Increasingly we see this demand for smart sensors not just as wishful thinking, but governments and regulators as turning it into policy requirements for certain systems. For example, in Europe, under the General Vehicle Safety Regulation, all new types of vehicles must be fitted with an advanced driver distraction warning system from mid-2024, where driver eye movements are monitored and warned when distracted to help reduce accidents. No doubt this will soon follow in the US and elsewhere. A new type of sensor capable of visual intelligence will be necessary to meet this and similar smart sensors or devices based on machine vision.

2. How do you plan to adapt or lead in these areas?

Oculi has had a head start and innovated on our technology over decades since we understood the problems with the conventional image sensor model of ever-increasing data from dumb pixels, high bandwidth transfer to power hungry post-processing processors to achieve current smart sensors.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Oculi

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Menta

By Nick Dutton, senior director for product marketing, Atmosic

Nick Dutton

Consumers and businesses alike are prioritizing sustainability in their purchase decisions. We’re all becoming more conscious of the environmental impact of the products we use and discard. Below is a look at some segments where we’re seeing this demand for sustainability in full force.

In 2024, we’ll see consumers double down on sustainable asset trackers. Why? Simply put, people want a more convenient way to keep track of their items, whether it be luggage, keys, or even pets. As consumers are deciding what type of tracker to purchase, battery life is a critical consideration. Replacing batteries costs time and money. Plus, battery waste is bad for the environment, making eco-friendly asset trackers a must-have. One great example is the Samsung SmartTag2, which delivers 700 days of battery life thanks to Atmosic’s ATM3325 Bluetooth 5.3 SoC.

Furthermore, many industries—including healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing—rely heavily on asset tracking applications. Asset trackers are a great way for businesses to manage the equipment in their facilities and keep tabs on where shipments are going. Since these companies have anywhere from hundreds to thousands or even millions of assets to manage, it’s critical that businesses choose sustainable asset trackers to minimize their maintenance time, costs, and carbon footprint.

We’re seeing a growing demand for other types of sustainable devices as well. Retail stores are adopting eco-friendly electronic shelf labels (ESLs) to display real-time pricing information. Enterprises are adopting sensors and beacons with extended battery life that can be integrated into all sorts of IoT applications. Plus, consumers are looking for eco-friendly keyboards and mice. Targus’ ErgoFlip EcoSmart Mouse, which was selected as a CES 2024 Innovation Award Honoree, stands out in this category; it reduces power consumption by using an Atmosic ATM2 Bluetooth SoC that is four times more energy efficient than other BLE chipsets.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Atmosic

Here are two predictions by Gary Campbell, EVP Central Engineering and Richard Grisenthwaite, EVP Chief Architect, Arm

The future of AI

By Gary Campbell, EVP Central Engineering, Arm

“AI is fundamentally changing the way we live and work, and this transformation will only accelerate over the next 12 months – and well beyond that. In 2024, the conversation around AI will become more nuanced, focused on the different types of AI, use cases and – crucially – what technological foundation we need to put in place to make the AI-powered world of the future a reality.

Advanced, purpose-built chips will play a critical role in allowing today’s AI technologies to scale and in fueling further advancements in their deployment. The CPU is already vital in all AI systems, whether it is handling the AI workload entirely or in combination with a co-processor, such as a GPU or an NPU. As a result, there will be a heightened emphasis on the low power acceleration of these algorithms and the chips that run AI workloads in areas of intense compute power, like large language models, generative AI, and autonomous driving.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – ARM

By Dr. Larry Williams, Distinguished Engineer at ANSYS Inc. 

Dr. Larry Williams

Technological Innovations

There are a number of technological innovations that I predict will turn heads in 2024.

First, continued 3D-IC and heterogeneous integration. The slowing of Dennard Scaling and Moore’s Law can be mitigated in part by 3D-IC integration, but 3D-IC has several multiphysics challenges like thermal integrity, mechanical stress, and warpage. This is due to differential thermal expansion, electromagnetic modeling for signal integrity, and full-system power integrity. These trends drive the industry to add simulation of novel physical effects as part of integrated EDA workflows. Ansys RedHawk-SC Electrothermal offers a gold-standard technology platform to examine and simulate the multiphysics behavior of 2.5D and 3D-IC designs. Designers use it to model and analyze the full-system multiphysics of entire 3D-IC designs, including chip, interposer, package, and system boundary conditions. RedHawk-SC Electrothermal relies on core solver technology from trusted golden signoff tools including RedHawk-SC™, HFSS™, Icepak™, Ansys Mechanical™, and more, to provide a comprehensive workflow for the multiphysics challenges.

From these innovations, it’s clear that 3D-IC technology is driving an inflection point in semiconductor design, which has spurred Ansys and the entire EDA industry to retool with an expanded set of multiphysics capabilities that will still be undergoing rapid advances in 2024.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – ANSYS

By Ken Butler, Business Development Senior Director, Advantest Cloud Solutions (ACS)

Ken Butler

Most semiconductor market sectors saw a softening of business in 2023. However, 2024 should herald a rebound in demand. One driver will be the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, which has already awarded its first contract as of this writing, and the similar efforts in other countries, each intended to minimize reliance on foreign sources within their respective semiconductor supply chains. Another part of that increase will be attributed to recent significant growth in the use of artificial intelligence (AI). In day-to-day life, there are many examples, such as AI-powered text and image generation, large language model (LLM)-enabled search engines from all the major providers, and AI productivity enhancers for many endeavors in STEM fields and others.

AI in Semiconductor Test

Semiconductor test is no exception to the infusion of AI technology into workflows and will also benefit from these new advances. In late 2023, Advantest announced the availability of the ACS Real-Time Data Infrastructure (RTDI), fueled by customer demand for adding complex AI/ML analytics to their test solutions. For all modern semiconductor products, but particularly for highly integrated “More than Moore” chiplet-based designs, product teams will continue to look for ways to incorporate advanced inferencing into the test process to optimize this valuable resource. Test optimization will be a frequent goal – every device should see “the right” test content – no more and no less than it needs. But today’s neural network-based techniques will also be used to detect devices that are quality or reliability risks, and should either be scrapped or have additional screening applied to ensure they will meet the demands of the end application and do so throughout the expected lifetime. Yield improvement will be another target, and AI will be applied to maximize product learning during the initial product ramp and into high-volume manufacturing. These inferences will increasingly be written in the languages favored by data scientists, such as Python, and made to run in concert with a test program written in a more traditional programming language.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Advantest

By Andreas Kuehlmann, CEO, Cycuity

Andreas Kuehlmann

Regulations and Vulnerabilities Make 2024 a Pivotal Year for  Semiconductor Chip Security

What 2024 Holds for Semiconductor Chip Security

Conversations around semiconductor chip security took place with greater frequency and prominence in 2023. Government legislation and newly discovered hardware vulnerabilities thrust the issue under the spotlight, and these developments will ensure hardware security remains a priority throughout 2024 and beyond.

The good news is that with so much at stake, the semiconductor industry is recognizing the need for more investments, accountability, and transparency. In 2024, we expect security will become a greater part of the design process, with higher priority given to adapting a comprehensive security design lifecycle ranging from developing verifiable security requirements, comprehensive security verification to documentation of security signoff.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Cycuity