Bob Smith Executive Director ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community

2021 will bring plenty of change, as well as another year of uncertainty. Nonetheless, the semiconductor industry will persevere. As it did in 2020, it will show resiliency and resolve and a willingness to tackle technological challenges.

A look back on 2020 reinforces the industry’s widespread influence. Work from home and remote learning would not be possible without the efforts and technology brought forward by the semiconductor industry that linked us together. That goes also for design tools from the electronic system design community that enabled this advancement.

Moving into 2021, I expect the industry to roll out new products designed to increase seamless telecommunications and enhance home office productivity as we continue remote learning and living.

In-person networking events may be nixed again in favor of on-line virtual events. Now that industry organizations such as SEMI and the ESD Alliance have experience organizing virtual events, new and improved forms of continuing education, connecting and networking will emerge.

SEMI and the ESD Alliance’s commitment to global advocacy and workforce development remains. We strive to bring about more equity, diversity and inclusiveness through mentoring and retaining a diverse, innovative and skilled workforce.

2021 may be rockier than any of us want and change is inevitable. The semiconductor industry will thrive and endure as it did in 2020.

Read the rest of The Semiconductor Industry will Persevere in 2021

As the leading supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) solutions, Synopsys provides chip designers with solutions and methodologies to address the dynamic challenges of hardware design. Looking at the year ahead, we see some trends in a few key application areas that will be interesting to track.

Artificial Intelligence Calls for Innovative Design Solutions

With the proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) applications comes a need for more innovative hardware architectures. While these architectures are unprecedentedly complex and large, performance-per-watt remains critical for efficient operations. For this, our AI experts, Arun Venkatachar and Stelios Diamantidis, anticipate broader adoption of enhanced versions of existing tools. It’s time for existing tools to become more architecture-aware and feature new capabilities and approaches that dramatically accelerate implementation of new compute paradigms. For example, consider design implementation solutions that connect with the designer’s requirements at a higher level of abstraction to allow an accurate estimate of power, performance, and area (PPA) during the architectural exploration phase. Such solutions would be most beneficial if they follow a highly convergent path through to final signoff for manufacturing.

Read the rest of Synopsys: 2021 Predictions for EDA Innovation

25 Years ago, had I shared the prediction I am about to share now, I would have been laughed out of the conference room in any FPGA company. Not in a rude way, but with the sort of polite pat on the back you would give an intern who is just entering the real world from academia.

Schematic capture was the way ‘real engineers’ did FPGA design, inch thick data books outlined each and every detail of the logic and routing structures, and there was a sense of pride when someone completed a ‘boot camp’ on an FPGA vendor’s proprietary toolchain that often shipped on a stack of 3 1/2” floppy disks as long as a loaf of bread. We scanned newspaper ads for the latest Fry’s Electronics sales so that we could upgrade our desktop PC or Unix workstation with the fastest processor and largest amount of RAM available so that we could get our larger FPGA designs to place and route in less than a day.

Brian Faith, CEO, QuickLogic

Fast forward to today. We have come so far in many ways. For FPGA users, schematic design is a lost art, replaced long ago by languages such as Verilog and VHDL, and increasingly by languages like System C and Python. Data books are now merely electrons.

And yet in other ways we are still stuck in that time. Proprietary FPGA toolchains are the very definition of bloatware, still requiring very capable and expensive computers. Moreover, the deep experience an engineer has in using a proprietary toolchain appears to be a benefit, but that benefit is only an illusion – much like a mirrored room – one that appears to have endless capacity but is in fact very much constrained.

Read the rest of Electronics Industry Predictions – Quicklogic

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.

Read the rest of Electronic Design Industry Predictions – Lanza techVentures

Bipul Talukdar Director of Applications Engineering, North America, SmartDV

The chip design weathered 2020 pretty well and, from all accounts, is on track to do even better in 2021.

2020 taught us how to work more efficiently and productively, important skills as we move into 2021. Design activity is ongoing and robust even as the industry dynamics shifted to a work-from-home model. Working from home, in many cases, means less distractions and more dedicated hours on a project. Remote meetings and virtual events are commonplace and the industry adapted, though it’s been a difficult adjustment for designers who are better at using a whiteboard than words to describe their work.

As we move through 2021, I predict the raging complexity of SoCs and new applications will make chip design verification even more important. Now clocked in at 60% to 80% of a project development cycle, verification may, in fact, consume a larger chunk of a time. The risk of a failed design is too great and the need for a respin on a complex chip manufactured in an advanced process node can be expensive or worse, ruinous for a company with limited resources.

Read the rest of SmartDV – Electronic Design Industry Predictions

Victor Peng, president and CEO

In 2021, several major trends will be a continuation of developments from 2020 that will be accelerated. These include: applications moving to the cloud, edge computing, 5G, the explosion of data from more and diverse endpoints, heterogeneous computing including new domain specific architectures for AI and other workloads, and industry consolidation/integration.

Covid-19 in 2020 has been a revelation in terms of remote work, learning, healthcare, entertainment, factory operation, and so on. The pandemic will further accelerate these trends in 2021 and drive new innovations and business models. In more general terms, we’ll witness the acceleration of the digitization of everything, pervasive and connected intelligence from end points, to the edge, and cloud, the need for high-performance, low-latency and adaptive computing, and dealing with the end of Moore’s Law.

Read the rest of Xilinx 2021 CEO Outlook

Onn Haran
CTO & Co-Founder of Autotalks

Global expansion of V2X will take place in 2021, deployed in vehicles and infrastructure. In China, all OEMs have demonstrated their V2X capabilities and readiness in the recent ‘New Four-Layers’ interoperability event in Shanghai. Many OEMs will deploy a line of production vehicles starting next year, and expanding in the years to follow. For example, GM announced that the 2021 Buick GL6 will include V2X. More announcements from other OEMs are expected. In parallel, V2X infrastructure will be installed across the country.  Today, there are multiple infrastructure pilots in over 10 provinces. V2X will be added to C-NCAP scoring starting 2023.

V2X equipped infrastructure will be deployed in Europe as well. France and Czech Republic already have many C-ITS station installed and plan to enhance the deployment.  Other large-scale deployment are planned in Austria and other countries. Volkswagen will continue to equip its best-selling vehicles with V2X. A project to add V2X to EuroNCAP rating will start in full-force, highlighting the importance of V2X for future safety. Since 90% of the vehicles sold in EU are NCAP rated, the OEMs would kick-off their production programs.

US has finally selected a V2X technology, bringing certainty to the US market that will allow OEMs to actually start deploying. Although no vehicles with V2X will reach US roads next year, OEMs will accelerate their productization plans, with some early deployments in 2022, as was announced by Ford.

Read the rest of 2021 V2X forecast

Shawn Carpenter Program Director, 5G & Space

Deployment strategies for 5G

5G in 2021 will be all about deployment – the infrastructure and handsets are available and is being rolled out as we speak.

However, carriers have taken a very diverse range of approaches to this deployment. For example, some carriers have used long range, low frequency bands that don’t add that much bandwidth to mobile user download speeds, compared to the low-range, high frequency, high speed bands that are also part of 5G. This means that in effect, a consumer could purchase an expensive 5G phone and not necessarily experience a superior connectivity speed to the one they enjoyed with 4G / LTE. However, there will also be some areas that will be able to access the breathtakingly fast speeds that 5G is capable of.

5G deployment is also very complex. Some carriers are completely ripping out and replacing their 4G infrastructure with 5Ginfrastructure that is backwards compatible – but this is a very expensive approach. Other carriers are installing 5G equipment on 4G masts and either working to avoid interference, or actively looking at dynamic spectrum sharing – and yet more are creating two separate systems for 4G and 5G, which means buying two sets of equipment.

Read the rest of Ansys Elecronic Design Industry Predictions

Frankwell Lin President, Andes Technology

2020 was a year like no other in recent history. The worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has had a severe impact on the global economy. In the challenging times, we are all learning how to resume normal operations and seek opportunities at the same time.

Production in Full Swing despite COVID-Crisis

Widespread vaccination is key to the global economy’s return to pre-pandemic levels of activity. As the coronavirus vaccine is on track for international deployment, however, the global economy is not expected to recover until mid-2021. Even so, the pattern of our working life has already changed irreversibly. Working from home, for instance, may become a new norm for some companies as it not only prevent the spread of the virus, but also reduces operating costs.

Due to the rise of the stay-at-home economy brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are seeing a huge growth in applications including wireless networking, gaming, at-home learning, etc. Some of the products are even facing shortage due to strong demand worldwide. The production of many semiconductor manufacturers is in full swing because of the related orders. The momentum is expected to last in 2021 as stay-at-home economy will likely thrive before the pandemic ends. Taiwan’s IC industry chain is ready for the development and production of these popular applications.

Read the rest of Opportunities and Challenges for Semiconductor Industry Awaits in 2021

Calista Redmond CEO of RISC-V International

The RISC-V era of computing is here. Today there are more commercial IP providers working on RISC-V than any other architecture. Adoption is growing quickly, as reflected in a Wilson Research Group/Siemens double-blind 2020 study, which found that 23% of ASIC and FPGA projects incorporated RISC-V in at least one processor. The free and open standard RISC-V ISA is the perfect base for the multitude of specialized processors we see today and is growing to meet new workload demands due to the incredible design flexibility and modular approach of RISC-V that enables a proliferation of design options for designers.

In 2021 and beyond, open source collaboration will continue to grow with RISC-V appearing in consumer devices such as wearables, home appliances, robotics, autonomous vehicles, factory equipment and more. We are working on expanding learning opportunities for a broader audience to teach and learn about the ISA helping to further accelerate adoption and use of RISC-V across industries. RISC-V also anticipates the Q1 2021 public review for our Vector, Bit Manipulation, Scalar Cryptography, Packed SIMD, Secure PMP and Virtual Memory extensions to make it even easier for companies to build innovative RISC-V solutions. We have made incredible progress over the past few years, and we look forward to seeing it continue in 2021.

Read the rest of RISC-V Electronic Design Industry Predictions 2021