EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2022 – Ansys

By Rich Goldman, Director of Marketing, Ansys

What novel thing did Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Google & Amazon all do in 2021? They all designed bespoke silicon, specific to their application to give them each a big competitive advantage. As an added bonus, bespoke silicon reduced the dependency on standard silicon making these companies less vulnerable to the great semiconductor shortage of 2021.

Competitors have noticed, and they are ramping up to make bespoke silicon the driving trend of 2022. But bespoke silicon isn’t as accessible as ASIC was back in the day. Whereas ASIC democratized chip design and enabled many a startup, bespoke silicon is driven by innovative systems companies with specific applications. These systems companies are bringing their systems expertise to IC design. Bespoke chips are much larger, encompassing many more functions, and are driving the second big trend of 2022, 3D-IC.

3D-IC, with its embrace of chiplets and substrate interconnects not only enables bespoke silicon but bring new challenges to semiconductor design and EDA. Physics that were previously analyzed and optimized only at the system level, now must be comprehended at the 3D-IC level. For example, stacking chiplets can create hot spots which must be analyzed and mitigated. That heat may create warpage and degrade timing, These physics must be analyzed concurrently, not separately, driving the third great trend of 2022: The recognition of the imperative for multiphysics, and not just multiple physics. New design techniques, previously applied only at the systems level will need to be developed and applied at the 3D-IC level.

The incorporation of multiphysics will drive the fourth big trend of 2022: open multiphysics platforms. No single EDA company can provide all the technology required for successful design of bespoke 3D-IC silicon, and we will see a new trend of collaboration amongst EDA vendors to provide the best possible design environment. The collaboration between Synopsys and Ansys is the current best example of this new cooperation.

By Rich Goldman, Director of Marketing, Ansys
rich.goldman@ansys.com

Rich Goldman is the Director of Product Marketing at Ansys. He was the head of marketing at photonic simulation provider Lumerical, a partner at the semiconductor start up incubator Silicon Catalyst, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Synopsys, and CEO of Synopsys Armenia. Goldman holds honorary PhD degrees from Russian Armenian University and State Engineering University of Armenia. He is Honorary Professor at Moscow Institute of Technology and was a Visiting Professor at Chinese Academy of Sciences. He judged the million-dollar Dubai Drones for Good competition. Alongside astronaut Neil Armstrong, cosmonaut Alexi Leonov, physicist Steven Hawking and Queen lead guitarist Brian May, Goldman authored the chapter ‘Semiconductors and Space Travel’ in the book ‘Starmus’.

Tags: Predictions

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