Electronic Design Industry Predictions – Lanza techVentures

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.

Lucio Lanza, Managing Director

IoT is changing the semiconductor industry dynamics as hundreds of thousands of different designs need a different set of goals, requirements and mentality. Each design must be cost effective because a chip today should be designed quickly, cheaply and boldly by anyone with a natural ability. New communities of designers are already working on new generations of designs using a new approach enabled by an open-source environment that offers a creative and strategic advantage with low-cost implementation tools.

In 2021 and beyond, chiplets will be the next semi-custom design with libraries of silicon IP that will produce them at lower costs in less time. System design vendors have an opportunity to respond to the explosion of silicon-on-package designs such as these. They may be low-end today but could develop into broadly used heavy-duty deep-silicon designs more in line with yesterday’s chip designs.

With the promise of IoT, billions of people around the world will be connected, strongly impacting society, a similar evolutionary phenomenon from the agricultural society to the industrial age. The semiconductor industry will lead the way.

About Lucio Lanza

Lucio Lanza is the Managing Director of Lanza techVentures, an early-stage venture capital and investment firm, and the 2014 recipient of the Phil Kaufman Award for Distinguished Contributions to Electronic System Design. Dr. Lanza joined the venture capital industry in 1990 after executive positions at Olivetti, Intel, Daisy Systems and Cadence Design Systems. He holds a doctorate in electronic engineering from Politecnico in Milan, Italy.

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