By Tora Fridholm, Corporate Marketing Manager at Codasip

In 2024, the tech scene is in for a shake-up and it’s all about customization and Custom Compute.

Technological Innovations / AI

AI’s shift to the edge is driving demand for custom accelerators, and RISC-V processors are stealing the spotlight. Companies designing AI platforms will be looking for differentiation as industry consolidation accelerates. Differentiation with unique algorithms will be augmented with customized processors for the specific software workloads. Meta openly talked about this at the RISC-V Summit (Nov. 2023) and more companies will make their plans public.

Codasip is investing in Custom Compute and using this technology to drive advances in AI for IP verification and design as well as technologies to drive end-user AI applications.
Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Codasip 

By Pat Brockett, CEO, Celera Inc

Pat Brockett

Time for the Innovation Floodgates to Finally Open

Product innovation has accelerated over the past decade. Thanks to the widespread deployment if AI, there is now intelligence in just about every product we touch. These changes have improved our lives and saved some in the process. The trend seems to be unstoppable. But there is another side of what is happening all around us. It has to do with what is creating innovation, and what is enabling that innovation.

For many decades the chip industry led the way for innovation. A new processor from Intel or new cell phone platform from Qualcomm would define new markets and spur innovation. Over the past decade or so that’s changed. Now, software leads the way for innovation. New business models, new user experiences and all that intelligence we see in everything is defined by software.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Celera

By Pim Tuyls, CEO, Intrinsic ID

     Pim Tuyls

Looking Ahead: Security Trends for 2023

The world is becoming ever more connected through the internet of things (IoT) and reliant on these connections to drive communication, commerce, healthcare, and defense systems. At the same time, cyberattacks are on the rise. This drives the need for secure authentication, trusted communication, and data protection. Each device in the connected world must be safe and trustworthy; each data communication must be protected from eavesdropping; each embedded software program must be protected from reverse-engineering; the privacy of each piece of personal data must be preserved. This is a very complex problem that is only becoming more so as connected devices have begun to comprise numerous components from multiple manufacturers.

Happily, there is rapidly growing awareness that security is vital to keep the connected world that we all depend on safe and trustworthy. Here I will identify several trends that I believe will be driving the wider adoption of security solutions for the semiconductor market in 2023.

System-in-Package

Moore’s Law is reaching its limits, and with chip designs growing ever more complex, it is becoming increasingly difficult for many designs to fit onto a single die. This is either because of limitations to the reticle size for chip manufacturing or because it’s getting more complex and very expensive to scale a monolithic system-on-chip (SoC) down to a new technology node. The solution for these limitations in the production process is the system-in-package (SiP), where one package contains multiple individual chiplets, each with their own functionality. This approach results in lower cost and faster time-to-market, while enabling specific functions to be implemented at their optimal technology nodes. Because of these benefits, Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of all semiconductor devices shipped will incorporate advanced 3D packaging technology, up from less than 1% in 2021.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Intrinsic ID

By Jim Garstka, VP Sales & Business Development, Plasma-Therm

Jim Garstka

 Global Digitalization Will Drive Market Demand

The coming year will prove to be another exciting period of technological advances in the semiconductor industry, as our daily lives continue to become more digitized. Consumer applications that will continue to grow in 2023 include electric and autonomous vehicles, augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and hyperscale data centers – all of which have driven growth the past few years and are expected to accelerate in the coming year as market demand rises.

So, what is driving the advances that are making these consumer applications more affordable, effective and power-efficient? Wide-bandgap compound semiconductors such as silicon carbide (SiC), gallium nitride (GaN) and gallium oxide (Ga₂O₃) are some of the critical materials behind these emerging technologies. These materials are essential to the growing power device market – which is forecasted to grow at a rapid compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 34% between now and 2027, according to the Yole Group’s Power SiC 2022 report. This bodes well for Plasma-Therm and other equipment providers with proven expertise in providing solutions for these materials, including our broad offering of etch, thin-film deposition and rapid thermal processing products. Chip manufacturers will increasingly need to work with suppliers who have the tool and material expertise to optimize processes that produce high-performance, energy-efficient chips, and we expect 2023 to be another banner year in these high-growth specialty markets.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Plasma-Therm

By Burnie Wu, VP of Business Development, MemVerge

Burnie Wu

Our company and area of specialization with respect to EDA workloads entails applying memory virtualization and transparent checkpointing of unmodified EDA applications to achieve operational cost savings and/or performance improvements. Hence, our specific predictions for 2023 are based on our unique vantage point into the EDA industry.

• EDA users will continue seeking to migrate workloads to public clouds. At the same time, they will be seeking ways to reduce cloud computing costs through increased use of public spot instances.
• The first generation of CXL memory-enabled x86 servers will begin shipping and be qualified for use with memory-bound EDA workloads. This will lift some of the capacity and bandwidth constraints for EDA applications and improve runtimes.
• Interest in transparent checking pointing/recovery (including rollback) of running EDA applications will grow as implementations mature and more use cases for improving productivity and efficiency are validated by both system administrators and users.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Memverge

By Koen Verhaege, CEO, Sofics

Koen Verhaege

Two different perspectives

In 2022, the pure-play foundries (TSMC, GlobalFoundries, UMC, SMIC …), collectively have produced more wafers than 100% of their wafer capacity (per the GSA) – and at the same time wafer prices have gone up significantly too. Foundries gear up for 2024 – according to SEMI, collectively they are spending north of $500B to build new fabs. EU and US governments launch previously unseen subsidy budgets for semiconductors.

But purchase manager indices show a negative trend as we leave 2022 behind us (J.P.Morgan). Inflation, at least in Europe, is higher than ever since 2007 – that’s when the #iphone was first introduced. The consumer’s consumption power is reduced (unless you work in Belgium, where salaries are automatically adjusted about 11% coming January – must be the only country in the world, but let me know if we are mistaken).

These are 2 perspectives that seem to clash, yet we do live in one world, one reality. So how does this all add up? Or better how do we resolve this? We will be happy to read your comments.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Sofics

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – CAST

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.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – Arteris

By Christian Eder, Product Marketing Director, congatec

Christian Eder

COM-HPC Mini ushers in a new era

Coming at last: Design sprints from COM Express Compact to COM-HPC

The first COM-HPC Mini Computer-on-Modules will soon hit the market. The final ratification of the new COM-HPC Mini standard, expected for the first half of 2023, will solve the Gordian knot that developers of ultra-compact COM Express Basic systems have been facing.

Once available, COM-HPC Mini modules with 13th generation Intel Core processors (codename Raptor Lake) will complete the ecosystem open to developers of third generation modular high-end embedded and edge applications. An ecosystem which ranges from high-end Server-on-Modules to extremely compact Client-on-Modules that are barely larger than a credit card. Even the most space-constrained COM Express Compact and COM Express Mini solutions can benefit from a high-end performance boost and a significantly larger number of new high-speed interfaces provided from COM-HPC Mini. Thus, entire product families can migrate to the new PICMG standard – without requiring significant modification of the internal system design and housing despite the larger module and carrier board dimensions.

Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2023 – congatec