Shawn Prestridge, Lead FAE Engineer and US FAE Team Manager IAR Systems

2021 may be the most highly anticipated year in quite some time, and for many reasons. In the embedded space, the biggest challenge will be the continued pressure to improve quality yet still deliver faster, especially with the rapid growth of the IIoT, IoT, 5G, AI, and cloud/edge computing.

In today’s embedded development, there is an essential need for automated processes to ensure quality, and to run builds and tests continuously. More and more companies are bringing this to the next level through the practice of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) in their Linux-based build environments, automating the release process and making it possible to deploy the application at any time. This is being driven by the unprecedented growth of the IoT, 5G, AI, and cloud/edge computing.

Embedded teams are completing software updates faster than ever, which can be challenging in embedded software, where a small error can render a system inoperable.  CI uses a robust tool set to inspect code quality and ensure it conforms to safe, reliable coding practices and then automatically subjects the code to a rigorous battery of tests designed by the QA engineers to ensure it performs as expected. This class of automation improved development practices across industries. Automated CI essentially forces developers to write code following best practices and as people find new and better ways to add to automated testing, it will lead to the use of local copies of code analysis that desk-checks code and before it goes into a formal build.  Developers will want to be sure their code is reliable before others see it in the continuous integration output.

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Carlos Pardo, CEO and Co-founder, KDPOF

Integrated Optical Solutions for In-vehicle Networking

In automotive, electric mobility and autonomous driving are the key development paths providing innovative possibilities. In parallel, they bring along major challenges for in-vehicle connectivity. Especially applications such as battery management systems, camera and sensor links, fast Ethernet links and smart antenna links demand for solutions that are reliable, robust, low-weight and low-effective at the same time.

Consequently, the trend goes towards optical Ethernet networks with integrated solutions. Implementing several functions – for example transceiver IC, photodiode and LED into one Fiber Optic Transceiver device functioning as single optical port – significantly reduces cost and footprint for automotive Ethernet. The decreased number of parts also lowers the effort in testing and qualification, thus substantially decreasing the overall expense. Further advantages are easy implementation, no margin stacking between links in the supply chain and supply chain simplification.

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By Liam Devlin, CEO, PRFI

GaAs and GaN Power Amplifier (PA) ICs will see increased adoption in mmWave 5G base stations. The cell sizes in urban mmWave 5G will be small. This is in part due to the need to provide very high data rate services to multiple users in a dense environment, but is also a feature of the limited non-line-of-sight propagation capabilities of mmWave signals. Si technology can provide a lower cost and is better suited to higher levels of integration, but cannot reach the RF power levels that GaAs and GaN technologies can offer. While many base station developers would like to use Si technology throughout, the higher RF power levels offered by GaAs and GaN are likely to be necessary to offer a robust system. With the increased density of mmWave cells, reducing power consumption will be a major consideration, and technologies such as Doherty will increasingly be favored to improve PA efficiency.

There will be significant growth in the use of Ku- and Ka-band satcomms for global broadband access. There are a number of broadband satcomms systems in these bands that are either in operation or under development. In addition to Space X’s much-publicized Starlink system, Inmarsat’s Global Xpress system is already operational and the recent bail-out of OneWeb by the UK government and Bharti Global means they can complete their planned global broadband satellite internet service. Other companies offering broadband access via satellite include Viasat in the US and Eutelsat in Europe. The links from these broadband satellites back to the ground stations—and also between satellites–also use mmWave links. Emerging High-Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) such as those being deployed or developed by Loon, HAPSmobile and Stratospheric Platforms, utilize mmWave links as well, and we expect all of these applications to accelerate the demand for MMICs at higher frequencies.
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Marc Pegulu, Vice President Wireless LoRa and IoT at Semtech

As we look toward the year ahead, IoT shows promise in continuing to enable a more connected world – whether that be in our homes, offices, neighborhoods or cities.  While everyone is relying on enhanced connection these days, the development and evolvement of IoT will result in a rise in use cases, further showcasing the importance of the technology. The following are IoT predictions for 2021:

Smarter Homes: The changes and adjustments we’ve made throughout 2020 to make our lives more comfortable has brought to the forefront just how much we need technology – to work, to learn and to stay connected to one another. 2021 will continue to bring even more developments aimed at this goal. Smart home device consumption will rise as individuals continue to work and learn from their homes. With increased usage, we’ll see more demand for IoT solutions that offer immediate insight into the home’s efficiency as homeowners look to reduce costs associated with energy, water, and gas consumption. More homeowners will begin to implement sensors for motion tracking, door lock management, garage door monitoring, gas/water valve use, pipe leak detection, and electrical outlet monitoring.

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Bob Smith Executive Director ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community

2021 will bring plenty of change, as well as another year of uncertainty. Nonetheless, the semiconductor industry will persevere. As it did in 2020, it will show resiliency and resolve and a willingness to tackle technological challenges.

A look back on 2020 reinforces the industry’s widespread influence. Work from home and remote learning would not be possible without the efforts and technology brought forward by the semiconductor industry that linked us together. That goes also for design tools from the electronic system design community that enabled this advancement.

Moving into 2021, I expect the industry to roll out new products designed to increase seamless telecommunications and enhance home office productivity as we continue remote learning and living.

In-person networking events may be nixed again in favor of on-line virtual events. Now that industry organizations such as SEMI and the ESD Alliance have experience organizing virtual events, new and improved forms of continuing education, connecting and networking will emerge.

SEMI and the ESD Alliance’s commitment to global advocacy and workforce development remains. We strive to bring about more equity, diversity and inclusiveness through mentoring and retaining a diverse, innovative and skilled workforce.

2021 may be rockier than any of us want and change is inevitable. The semiconductor industry will thrive and endure as it did in 2020.

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As the leading supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) solutions, Synopsys provides chip designers with solutions and methodologies to address the dynamic challenges of hardware design. Looking at the year ahead, we see some trends in a few key application areas that will be interesting to track.

Artificial Intelligence Calls for Innovative Design Solutions

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications comes a need for more innovative hardware architectures. While these architectures are unprecedentedly complex and large, performance-per-watt remains critical for efficient operations. For this, our AI experts, Arun Venkatachar and Stelios Diamantidis, anticipate broader adoption of enhanced versions of existing tools. It’s time for existing tools to become more architecture-aware and feature new capabilities and approaches that dramatically accelerate implementation of new compute paradigms. For example, consider design implementation solutions that connect with the designer’s requirements at a higher level of abstraction to allow an accurate estimate of power, performance, and area (PPA) during the architectural exploration phase. Such solutions would be most beneficial if they follow a highly convergent path through to final signoff for manufacturing.

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25 Years ago, had I shared the prediction I am about to share now, I would have been laughed out of the conference room in any FPGA company. Not in a rude way, but with the sort of polite pat on the back you would give an intern who is just entering the real world from academia.

Schematic capture was the way ‘real engineers’ did FPGA design, inch thick data books outlined each and every detail of the logic and routing structures, and there was a sense of pride when someone completed a ‘boot camp’ on an FPGA vendor’s proprietary toolchain that often shipped on a stack of 3 1/2” floppy disks as long as a loaf of bread. We scanned newspaper ads for the latest Fry’s Electronics sales so that we could upgrade our desktop PC or Unix workstation with the fastest processor and largest amount of RAM available so that we could get our larger FPGA designs to place and route in less than a day.

Brian Faith, CEO, QuickLogic

Fast forward to today. We have come so far in many ways. For FPGA users, schematic design is a lost art, replaced long ago by languages such as Verilog and VHDL, and increasingly by languages like System C and Python. Data books are now merely electrons.

And yet in other ways we are still stuck in that time. Proprietary FPGA toolchains are the very definition of bloatware, still requiring very capable and expensive computers. Moreover, the deep experience an engineer has in using a proprietary toolchain appears to be a benefit, but that benefit is only an illusion – much like a mirrored room – one that appears to have endless capacity but is in fact very much constrained.

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Chiplets — Next Semi-Custom Design

In the early days of our industry, semiconductors were custom designed all the way through manufacturing, then and now considered heavy-duty deep silicon.

Next came semi-custom design and then silicon IP. We are now evolving from standard chips designed at a certain semiconductor node with a certain set of restraints to a more general design process to a more democratized design style.

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Bipul Talukdar Director of Applications Engineering, North America, SmartDV

The chip design weathered 2020 pretty well and, from all accounts, is on track to do even better in 2021.

2020 taught us how to work more efficiently and productively, important skills as we move into 2021. Design activity is ongoing and robust even as the industry dynamics shifted to a work-from-home model. Working from home, in many cases, means less distractions and more dedicated hours on a project. Remote meetings and virtual events are commonplace and the industry adapted, though it’s been a difficult adjustment for designers who are better at using a whiteboard than words to describe their work.

As we move through 2021, I predict the raging complexity of SoCs and new applications will make chip design verification even more important. Now clocked in at 60% to 80% of a project development cycle, verification may, in fact, consume a larger chunk of a time. The risk of a failed design is too great and the need for a respin on a complex chip manufactured in an advanced process node can be expensive or worse, ruinous for a company with limited resources.

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Victor Peng, president and CEO

In 2021, several major trends will be a continuation of developments from 2020 that will be accelerated. These include: applications moving to the cloud, edge computing, 5G, the explosion of data from more and diverse endpoints, heterogeneous computing including new domain specific architectures for AI and other workloads, and industry consolidation/integration.

Covid-19 in 2020 has been a revelation in terms of remote work, learning, healthcare, entertainment, factory operation, and so on. The pandemic will further accelerate these trends in 2021 and drive new innovations and business models. In more general terms, we’ll witness the acceleration of the digitization of everything, pervasive and connected intelligence from end points, to the edge, and cloud, the need for high-performance, low-latency and adaptive computing, and dealing with the end of Moore’s Law.

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