EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2024 – CacheQ

By Richard Preston, Hardware Lead, CacheQ Systems

Richard Preston

Technical Innovations, AI integration News and Unanticipated Market Trends in 2024

If 2024 is anything like 2023, it will be full of technical innovations, more news on AI advancements and up-trends in the semiconductor market.

Under the technological innovation category, the semiconductor industry will see more specialized hardware chips for specific workloads such as Large Language Models (LLMs) inferencing, speech processing, image and pattern recognition, and the continued pursuit of autonomous driving and smarter robotics. We will see an increased need for custom compilers to enable software development for these specialized chips. CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs will continue to serve specific markets, but pioneers will create custom ASICs to differentiate or improve product performance.

Conjecture about AI integration and semiconductor design will continue far into 2024. We can expect more software developers will use AI-generated code in their final products. The potential is also there for AI to auto-generate and self-deploy code for the most agile and responsive applications. The day when AI is permitted to go beyond informing a human, and control operations without human intervention is getting closer. Until then, there are many industries where AI can be an invaluable companion. Some industry experts allude to a day when AI can be an effective doctor, having been trained on a vast amount of information on known medical conditions, symptoms, and treatments. Perhaps 2024 will be the year medical professionals adopt greater use of AI as a companion tool.

Regarding market trends, AI is clearly the current hot topic and will be for some time. Predictably, software developers and hardware designers will continue to use the latest AI innovations to make their jobs more productive. They will complete tasks faster and retrieve more information with less research/ That use model will spill over into their personal lives with many of the same results.

We can expect an increased use of augmented reality across a variety of industries as new technology heightens the interactive experience. Beyond 2024, the systems will be smaller with lighter headwear or eyewear, and perhaps holograms, all with the intent of expanding the addressable market.

Many of these applications continue to push the compute demand required at the point of data capture and consumption. That leads to greater commercialization and commoditization of these specialized chips. Data center compute demand will grow as well for many applications including but not limited to faster AI training and inference. That means more GPUs, CPUs, and specialized chips.

The U.S. CHIPS Act and related funding will lend heavily to these trends in 2024. We also predict the industry will experience an increase in the number of skilled GPU developers as well as chip designers –– all lending to a compute renaissance. 2024 should be a great year for employment and innovations in the semiconductor and software development industries. Let’s see if this all pans out!

About Richard Preston

Richard Preston is a career FPGA developer with a passion for software development and a curiosity for understanding how things work. He has more than 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry where he held roles in FPGA development and verification, technical marketing, business development, and product planning of FPGAs and Programmable SoCs. Richard is currently the Hardware/FPGA Lead at CacheQ Systems and holds a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering with specialization in FPGA/ASIC design.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 25th, 2024 at 1:33 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.