EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – IC’Alps

By Emmanuel de Suremain, Marketing and Communication Manager, IC’Alps

2024 is already a very promising year for IC’Alps. After opening a second design center in Toulouse – France and becoming TSMC DCA partner, our design house is ready to take on any challenging ASIC project for our customer’s innovation.

We have especially prepared to contribute to the major evolutions we feel are occurring in the healthcare market. Secondly, we are witnessing an increasing demand for intelligence and autonomy ever closer to the sensors (the world is analog). Finally, our focus in 2024 will be to answer a growing need for security, safety/reliability-related requests around the way we design custom chips at IC’Alps.

The healthcare/medtech sector is already a strong focus for IC’Alps, as part of the French industrial Doliam Group and being certified ISO 13485. We are witnessing the growing need for more and more integration of active features closer and closer to the sensors. For example: active ultrasound probes, implantable leadless pacemaker or even real progress in measuring biomarkers in the brain. The common driver here is the need for direct data processing in the AIMD (Active Implantable Medical Device) for various purposes that differ application from application: lower consumption, more accurate data and safer devices for a relevant and efficient decision making. 50% of our activity is dedicated to serve innovative solution for the 4P or even 5P medicine.

The growing need for autonomy and intelligence is not a Healthcare market exception. In every market IC’Alps is active in, we witness, and 2024 should confirm this, various needs for various applications in terms of embedded intelligence, autonomy or AI. In terms of chip technology or process, the semiconductor production industry is very capable of addressing all needs. Mature nodes (from 180 to 110 nm) answer the need for very small analog chips with ultra-low power consumption (ultrasound transducer driver or chips for pacemaker). More advanced nodes (from 28 to 16 nm) for bigger systems dedicated to AI, Tiny ML or Virtual Reality devices as example. And very fine nodes (under 7 nm) for big circuits needing a lot of processing power, data storage with high frequency and bandwidth needs: supercomputer, generative AI, autonomous driving etc.

Increasing intelligence and communication features closer to the sensor will put a strong pressure on security, reliability and safety measures taken to mitigate the risks. Hardware solutions exist that ensure control or redundancy. We should witness an increase in requests around multiple parallel microprocessors (dual or triple lockstep) or multiple hardware implementation of the same feature for hard redundancy. Another way to mitigate risks associated with more complex communicating circuits is the risk and failure mechanism analysis, understanding side effects in case of specific events in the circuit, and implementing mitigation solutions. This approach is vital in the design of circuits for medical, aerospace, and automotive applications, markets for which IC’Alps is certified: medical, aerospace, and automotive (currently under study).

In any case, 2024 will be a very exciting and interesting year with already fantastic perspectives.
And all IC’Alps wishes you a splendid 2024 !

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 17th, 2024 at 4:14 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.