EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – OneSpin

OneSpin sees two trends dominating the semiconductor and EDA industry for 2019. The first is that security and trust will start becoming key requirements for many applications. Prevention of hardware vulnerabilities and protection from attacks are essential to ensure safety, data privacy and availability of essential infrastructure. Today, this field is dominated by software, but it has become clear that hardware must play a bigger role in addressing this challenge. Similar to safety, where standards such as ISO 26262 and hardware safety mechanisms protect systems against systematic and random failures, we will see the emergence of security standards. They will prescribe strict hardware development processes in order to avoid vulnerabilities and hardware security mechanisms that protect electronic systems from adversary attacks.

The problem of trust in the IC supply chain is also closely related with security and will become more prominent. How do you ensure that third-party or even internal IP do not include kill switches, backdoors, or other types of hardware Trojans? Dealing with unintended vulnerabilities is hard enough. Malicious vulnerabilities are even tougher to address because most verification and validation solutions we have now are not fit for this purpose. While the problem of trust is not yet on the radar of most organizations, in 2019, we will see a sharp growth in awareness of these type of issues.

The second trend is the growing importance of artificial intelligence (AI), especially deep learning and machine learning. In 2019, we shall see how various heterogeneous hardware platforms leveraging FPGAs, eFPGAs and RISC-V-based accelerators will compete to win portions of this market. While performance is a key differentiator, safety and security are still big, crucial challenges that may determine success or failure of a product. The ecosystem for RISC-V will also grow rapidly, with numerous design and verification IP (VIP) offerings plus specialized services. New EDA tools and features will help with the design and verification of RISC-V devices, including applications for formal technology to the ISA.

Tags: IC supply chain, Predictions, security

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