EDACafe Editorial 
Roberto Frazzoli
Roberto Frazzoli is a contributing editor to EDACafe. His interests as a technology journalist focus on the semiconductor ecosystem in all its aspects. Roberto started covering electronics in 1987. His weekly contribution to EDACafe started in early 2019. Major themes at DATE Conference: autonomous driving, post-CMOS technologies, Design for InspectionMarch 29th, 2019 by Roberto Frazzoli
 Juergen Bortolazzi. © DATE 2019 Risking to miss your flight? Save time at the airport by letting your car find a parking place by itself. Much like valet parking, but without a valet. This is the goal of a project from the Volkswagen Group, that Jürgen Bortolazzi from Porsche described in his opening keynote at the DATE Conference – which took place in Florence, Italy, March 25th to 29th. Autonomous driving was one of the key themes at the European event on design and test this year, and it echoed on many other speeches and debates during the conference. Bortolazzi observed that there is a gap between the current SAE level of driving automation, L2 (ADAS systems) and the next level L3 (real autonomous drive), therefore he predicted an intermediate level L2+ with more advanced ADAS. But getting to L3, he pointed out, will require major reductions in cost and power consumption. Autonomous drive takes a huge number of expensive sensors, and such a big amount of on-board processing power that – with the current technologies – car electronics might require water cooling. Bortolazzi also highlighted that China is very well positioned in the quest for autonomous driving, thanks to a comprehensive plan from the Chinese government that includes a regulation framework. Major stories this week: market reports, Synopsys, SMPSs, AI acceleration, batteriesMarch 23rd, 2019 by Roberto Frazzoli
Market research firms released new reports this week offering outlooks on three key industries; among them EDA, where Synopsys is making news with several announcements. Also, recent or upcoming conferences and trade shows are attracting attention on AI acceleration in servers, SMPS design and architectures, new battery technologies. More 300mm wafer fabs as foundries slow down and EDA market grows The worldwide number of operational 300mm wafer fabs is expected to climb to 121 this year and grow to a total of 138 fabs in 2023, according to a report recently released by IC Insights. As of today, however, this growing manufacturing capacity is being confronted by a slowing foundry business, as TrendForce points out in its newest research report. Foundries face a severe challenge in 1Q19, with global production revenue expected to decline by around 16% compared to the same quarter 2018, arriving at 14.6 billion USD. TSMC, Samsung and GlobalFoundries take first, second and third place respectively in market shares. According to TrendForce, although TSMC’s market share reaches 48.1%, the foundry suffers a near 18% decline in year-on-year growth. EDA, instead, will continue to grow at a significant pace: a recent report from ResearchAndMarkets.com values the global electronic design automation tools market at USD 9.76 billion in 2018 and predicts this figure to reach USD 17.35 billion by 2024 – with a forecasted CAGR of 10.1% during the period of 2019-2024. Major stories this week: Interconnect fabric, RISC-V ecosystem, ARM Neoverse, USB4March 15th, 2019 by Roberto Frazzoli
Three recent and unrelated events confirm the ever-growing importance of the technologies and architectures used to connect processing elements at all levels – within a chip, among chips, within a datacenter. Other significant announcements made over the past few days concern the growing RISC-V ecosystem; the first Arm Neoverse system development platform on TSMC 7nm process technology; and EDA/T&M vendors getting ready for USB4. Bit Traffic On March 11, the GPU vendor Nvidia announced the acquisition of Mellanox, a key player in high-performance interconnect technologies. With this acquisition, Nvidia aims at optimizing datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost. According to Nvidia, datacenters in the future will be architected as giant compute engines with tens of thousands of compute nodes, designed holistically with their interconnects for optimal performance. Hence the strategic importance of joining forces with Mellanox. Read the rest of Major stories this week: Interconnect fabric, RISC-V ecosystem, ARM Neoverse, USB4 EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – SilvacoJanuary 16th, 2019 by Babak Taheri
Atomistic CAD: We will see the adoption of atomistic TCAD to extend Moore’s law to model and simulate devices such as Nanowires and Nanosheets including sensors and quantum dots that approach a few nm in size. Collaborations with university researchers such as Purdue, and their NEMO suit of tools, will enable successful development of nanoelectronic and nanosensor solutions. Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – Silvaco EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – ESD AllianceJanuary 15th, 2019 by Bob Smith, Executive Director
Shifting supply chain dynamics as the design ecosystem moves away from years of a chip-centric focus to a broader system design perspective will bring new players in 2019. This will forge event stronger links between design and manufacturing that began in earnest in 2018. Global industry associations such as the ESD Alliance and SEMI will serve as conduits, creating opportunities for members to connect, partner and innovate through networking and industry events, the newest being ES Design West in 2019. To be co-located during SEMICON West 2019, ES Design West will be the only event in North America dedicated to the Design and Design Automation Ecosystem™ further uniting the electronic systems design community to the electronics supply chain. EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – OneSpinJanuary 14th, 2019 by Sergio Marchese
The problem of trust in the IC supply chain is also closely related with security and will become more prominent. How do you ensure that third-party or even internal IP do not include kill switches, backdoors, or other types of hardware Trojans? Dealing with unintended vulnerabilities is hard enough. Malicious vulnerabilities are even tougher to address because most verification and validation solutions we have now are not fit for this purpose. While the problem of trust is not yet on the radar of most organizations, in 2019, we will see a sharp growth in awareness of these type of issues. Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – OneSpin EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – EsperantoJanuary 11th, 2019 by Mike Buchanan
In 2019, we predict that ever more innovative AI applications will emerge, and that AI processing will move from first-generation solutions such as CPUs and GPUs to domain-optimized AI accelerator chips designed specifically for machine-learning algorithms. They will feature higher performance, reduced cost, and superior energy efficiency of typically ten times better than GPUs and 100 times better than CPUs. They will be scalable, and cover a much wider range of cost and power points. EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – GreenWaves TechnologiesJanuary 10th, 2019 by Martin Croome
Pure Moore’s law improvement, cutting costs in half while doubling the number of transistors, has increased from a year to 18 months. With the increasing limitations of Moore’s law, semiconductor companies will continue to extend further as the cost of implementing new processes and producing designs for them has skyrocketed. Read the rest of EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – GreenWaves Technologies EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – Verific Design AutomationJanuary 9th, 2019 by Michiel Ligthart
As Verific celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2019 with its software in production and development flows throughout the semiconductor industry worldwide, the technology horizon looks dazzling. Verification companies are announcing new tools, technologies and methodologies to support chip designs for artificial intelligence, machine learning, 5G wireless, and RISC-V to name a few. EDACafe Industry Predictions for 2019 – Breker Verification SystemsJanuary 8th, 2019 by Dave Kelf
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