EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – Presto

By Cédric Mayor, CEO, Presto Engineering

2024: Sailing the Semiconductor Ocean – After Turbulent Storms, Keeping Innovation as a Compass

Cédric Mayor

2023 will remain in everyone’s mind as the inevitable return to the basic balance between demand and supply. Our semiconductor industry entered 2023 after a traumatic supply shortage, quite unique in our industry’s recent history. With great determination, Presto Engineering confirmed its 2023 strategic choices and closed again a new record year.

While consumer-driven segments such as smartphones, computers and others had to weather the storm, Presto Engineering’s key market focus on the automotive, medical, industrial, and communication infrastructures has been rewarding. These segments demonstrated strong resilience due to their somewhat counter cyclic product life cycle and lack of inventory in 2022; most importantly, their never-ending semiconductor bill of materials was driven by heavy trends of automation, smart monitoring, and sensing.

Like many peers, I anticipate that demand will be back in 2024, especially once inventories in all segments return to normality after the first half of the year. Fundamentals like electrification, smart mobility, 5G maturity, and artificial intelligence (AI) will create demand for new ASIC and semiconductor devices. However, if global inflation is assumed to slow down this year, along with demand back again, I dare think that a talent shortage and energy price volatility will be rationales that will sustain sales price levels. The cost-per-transistor is not scaling down until it reaches below 20nm nodes, as we are now in a new era of reduced wafer price erosion along with different dynamics from node-to-node. While demand returns back full steam ahead in mature nodes, I expect that the global 8-inch wafer capacity footprint in China and trade restrictions will still impact prices significantly.

Geopolitical tensions (China/US) evolved in reshoring capacity and draining capital investments. Presto has clearly invested into its supply chain resilience, and supplier selection. Presto will continue to diversify our existing sourcing strategy and platform availability on different foundries to palliate any risks and uncertainty. Nobody has a crystal ball, and the sudden earthquake in Japan in January, as I wrote this viewpoint, reminds us too well how our industry can be fragile as a supply chain.

Marketwise, automotive is indeed becoming one of the most demanding segments for embedded sensors. We invested to become the largest supplier of LiDAR industrialization and manufacturing that is able to address both digital flash and mechanical LiDAR ICs, which are based on new silicon photonic or 3D IC and chiplet innovative packages. Frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) LiDAR will require silicon photonic expertise, photonic and electro-optical testing experience, as well as customized system-in-package design to bring our customers the best tradeoff for miniaturization and functionality. Presto has all the latter expertise to confirm its established leadership in LiDAR IC production for European and US automotive Tier-2 and industrial OEMs in intelligent transportation systems.

The healthcare industry is increasingly adopting semiconductor innovation, and I anticipate a continued acceleration of medical-specific ultra-low power analog front-end IP and ASIC devices for patient monitoring. In-vitro diagnostic (IVD), mental health, glucose or oximetry conditions, and many other vital signs will become a point-of-care practice, and new patient treatment workflows represent a tremendous opportunity for Presto’s core IP technologies. Our IVD platform (“Hugin”) has been released and validated to enter in-vitro diagnostic applications using electrical impedance spectrometry (EIS) and is now being evaluated by customers. We are investing in getting our optical platform (“Heimdal”) upgraded to integrate near-infrared spectroscopy analog front-end for portable point-of-care applications, which can open a wide space of applications that address skin conditions, wound healing processes, and all the information can be securely uploaded in a smartphone via NFC and a proven, secured embedded MCU.

In-flight connectivity and satellite internet broadcast are our two emerging communication segments that I anticipate will leverage our millimeter wave expertise in RF Ka and Ku bands. This will have an impact in 2024 for Presto as we start production of four critical circuits for customers.

Last but not least, we cannot ignore that AI is the next revolution, at least as important as the internet has been for our industry, and a clear catalyst of high-performance computing (HPC). At Presto, we are convinced it will change not only our ASIC IP and functionality concepts to integration machine learning (ML), and AI API, but also the way we implement our ASIC and semiconductor processes. I cannot wait for the release of our AI-featured IP platform roadmap (“MIMIR”) which will incorporate all edge computing AI/ML acceleration adapted to top notch ultra-low power computing for signal processing of very diverse sensor models from image sensors to motion sensors. Our MIMIR goal is to make customers’ ASICs for these edge-sensing nodes smarter and extremely more power efficient to filter-out noise, self-adapt to specific use cases, and provide accurate decision or data analysis, as opposed to spending energy to transfer and compute all bits and bytes in datacenters.

Operationally, AI/ML does change analog design, and from handcrafted design methods we are going to work on both automation AI-powered EDA flows, like specific trade-off transistor topology sizing, and more parameterized platforms and chiplet libraries. Such an addition to our expertise will help to strengthen our ability to deliver first time right silicon, in a lightning-fast time, hitting the time-to-market window of our customers.

On the other hand, we continue to invest heavily in our own OCEAN™ Platform as product lifecycle management tool, kicking off the AI-powered features to oversee supply demand and planning automation, as well as yield improvement of early routines. OCEAN™ is the only tool that can provide our customers with wall-to-wall access to a manufacturing semiconductor flow in a single virtual portal with in-depth traceability from design versions to EMS lots.

In a nutshell, I expect that 2024 will be, without surprise, a semiconductor recovery year for consumer electronics, and we will see continued growth in the medical, industrial and automotive segments. We will also see continued support for longer-term trends like IoT, electrification and power efficiency. It may take up to the second half of the year to absorb resilient inventories in the supply chain, but our confidence is solid as new devices are rolled out. Companies continue to invest in innovation and semiconductor content keeps growing in every product.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2024 at 5:30 am. 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.