Chip Design Market-Top 5 Trends
Gradually recovering chip design market has proved its worth to the current technology supply chain as every chip company is seeking to fulfill their customers chip demands.
With an ongoing chip supply-demand strain hovering over every semiconductor-based organization, semiconductor chips supply, used in everything from automobiles to graphics cards for PC gaming, is too thin to meet the ever-increasing demands of several industries due to which its prices have skyrocketed.
Though detrimental, the current semiconductor shortage may be a short-term looming issue. But a greater challenge might be coming up faster than we can think that could stall the current development and innovation of new chips and processors worldwide, would the evolution of the chip design market at a whole new level.
Changes in the chip design market will also bring a new level of complexity because these chips would require a myriad set of capabilities to support open source, flexible and adaptable designs. Thus, making it unclear if the current semiconductor industry would be ready to respond to this new change.
And though we can talk about many trends beginning to reshape the chip design market, we will be talking about the Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market that will be impacting this industry the most.
So, to summarize the Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market that will impact the industries are as follows.
Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market
Emerging NAND and DRAM
With the fierce competition going, on increasing the capacity of memory chips in the semiconductor design, the popularity of non-volatile memory chips will continue to rise thus making its place in the Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market.
NAND storage will continue to expand its limits incrementally, without disruptive architectural changes in the next few years. Currently, the most advanced NAND products are featuring 128 layers of storage capability.
Many companies have started developing low resistance metals like ruthenium while researching alternate memory dielectric stacks, as well as improving channel current and identifying ways to control the stress that rise due to the growing number of stacked layers.
DRAM, on the other hand, is experiencing a slowdown in cell scaling, and EUV lithography may be required to improve patterning. And this is where the low-temperature IGZO or indium-gallium-zinc-oxide family of transistors will enter the scene, placing these memory chips in the Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market.
Heterogeneous Integration enabled by 3D Technologies
Another trend seen in the Top 5 Trends in Chip design Market is the heterogeneous integration while utilizing 3D technologies. We are currently getting acquainted with more examples of systems that are being built through heterogeneous integration that leverage 2.5D or 3D connectivity.
Since, these options help address the memory wall, add functionality in form-factor constrained systems as well as improve yields on large chip systems, so their popularity is on the rise since its emergence.
Some of the recent examples of leveraging 3D connectivity include die-on-die stacking in Intel’s Lakefield CPU or chiplets on the interposer in AMD’s 7nm Epyc CPU. Thus, coming under Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market.
In the coming future, we are expecting many more of these heterogeneous SoCs to improve the system performance.
Rise of Edge AI Chip Industry
With an expected growth rate of above 100% in the coming few years, edge AI is emerging as one of the biggest Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market. Unlike cloud-based AI, inference functions are embedded locally on the IoT endpoints that reside at the edge of the network like cell phones and smart speakers.
Technology experts have long been proclaiming the death of Moore’s Law for many years that was originally an observation made by Intel Co-Founder Gordon Moore saying the number of transistors in an IC generally gets double after every two years.
But the introduction of AI chips in designing has shown its future potential in shaping the chip design market, therefore getting acknowledged in Top 5 Trends in Chip Design Market. It is believed now that Moore’s Law has plateaued, as chip designers are now striving for more advanced process nodes, while chip complexity has also increased leaps and bounds.
Chip Design Verification
With designs becoming more complex and connected, an upcoming need to not only verify IC designs functions according to one’s specification but also to verify and validate that chips work in the context of the end-system has arisen.
This is steadily becoming a norm of the chip designing market as the system needs to comply with a particular set of protocols or standards while ensuring safety and security.
Advanced systems companies, especially those involved in the automotive market, are on the verge of developing digital twins where they can thoroughly test, debug and refine their systems according to their specifications. Thus, securing its place in the Top 5 Trends in Chip Designing Market.
Increasing Focus on Software
Last but not the least, increasing usage of software while designing semiconductor chips has come up under the Top 5 Trends in Chip Designing Market.
Seeing the latest trend, an increasing amount of functionality is now coming from software. Also, the demand for software is slowly outstripping traditional methods for developing chip design making.
With this new ease of programming and several software applications getting launched day by day, FPGAs, and adaptable SoCs will continue to become more accessible for every software developer and AI scientists thus, making them the hardware solution of choice for next-generation technologies.
