Prediction for 2013 – Technology

1/3/2013 7:25 PM EST

Rick Stanton - Director of ENOVIA Strategy for Semiconductor and ALM Experiences, Dassault Systèmes

I predict more of a shift towards systems engineering and end-product focus within the semiconductor industry. The reliance on IP for complex design is similar to how systems companies leverage part management in their products.

The evolution of the semiconductor bill of materials (BOM) will include more than just the materials. It will include processes, compliance information, supply chain information and IP.

The semiconductor market will adopt many of the mature product design and manufacturing processes from other industries and apply them to complex IC design.

Dr. Zhihong Liu - Executive Chairman, ProPlus Design Solutions

As 2012 comes to a close, semiconductor, IP and EDA companies have made announcements touting availability of their 20nm processes, the successful tapeout of test chips and tools to support the designs at leading edge technologies. 20nm is here!

2013 will be the year the electronics industry is forced to grapple with 20nm to ensure a chip design gets from GDSII to good silicon, a path fraught with challenges. As a result, it will be increasingly focused on managing process variations, or design for yield (DFY), a trend that started from the 45nm node.

Ken Karnofsky - senior strategist for signal processing applications, MathWorks

There will be more “smart” devices.  This trend will spread rapidly beyond consumer devices (such as smart phones) to a wide range of embedded applications – including security, driver assistance, and industrial automation. These multifunction devices will acquire and adapt to input from sensors connected to the “real world,” and will generate huge amounts of data in the process.  This will drive deeper integration of analog and digital electronics, the complexity of embedded software, and the computational resources needed to support simulation and analysis of those systems.

Pervasive, inexpensive hardware will enable engineering students to apply theory and gain hands-on experience through project-based learning.

Brad Quinton - chief architect, Tektronix

Cloud computing, cloud storage and mobile devices will continue to drive the tech industry as a whole.  In the silicon space this will continue to fuel the rise of low-power application focused SoCs and the decline of stand-alone general purpose processors.  Success in the SoC market will continue to be based on firmware and software rather than raw silicon capability and companies will be increasingly desperate to start developing firmware and software earlier in the design cycles to meet shrinking product windows.  Hardware assisted Rapid Prototyping / ASIC Prototyping will rise to be the common solution in for early software development.

Markus Willems - Sr. Staff, Product Marketing Manager, Design & Processor Development, Synopsys

We will see an increase in embedded vision technology, making machines see and understand their environment. Computer vision algorithms have been a long standing research topic and now they make their way into embedded devices thanks to increased embedded processor performance. Applications include advanced driver assistance systems (automotive), gesture control (consumer, medical), and robotics (industrial) where power efficiency remains the biggest challenge and calls for the design of application-specific processors in this domain.