Prediction for 2013 – Technology

1/3/2013 7:25 PM EST

Dr. Raik Brinkmann - President and Chief Executive Officer, OneSpin Solutions

The term SoC will no longer be tied entirely to ASIC. It now applies to FPGAs, too. One FPGA now can hold a large SoC. While FPGA companies have claimed this for a while, it is real now. Take for example the Xilinx Zynq or MicroSemi SmartFusion2. They come with processor cores, complete operating systems, as well as specialized functionality, such as security, communication and DSP functions –– definitely SoCs, with the need to be fully verified.

Shawn McCloud - V.P. Marketing, Calypto Design Systems

70% of all new hardware design will occur for mobile devices including smartphones, laptops and tablets. Mobile designs will drive the need for EDA tools to reduce power and accelerate the time to product. Designers will need to optimize at the architecture level where 80% of power decisions are made.

New emerging video standards promise to hit the market offering greater video resolution or faster wireless performance. Very little RTL reuse is possible for such multimedia designs and we will see a greater percentage of new designs leveraging high-level synthesis from C++ or SystemC to meet time to market pressure.

Lip Bu Tan – CEO, Cadence

The mantra of “smaller, faster, cheaper, NOW” will get louder, as consumers increasingly demand instant access to information anytime, anywhere. The China and India markets for mobile devices will continue to grow exponentially, driving the rapid build out of cloud infrastructure like massive datacenters and software-defined networks to support the global growth of mobile devices. This means ongoing emphasis on better hardware performance, lower power consumption, and unparalleled security.

Apache Design, an ANSYS subsidiary

Market demands will continue to favor mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, driving a phenomenal growth rate for this segment through 2013 and beyond. However, as consumers benefit from the mobile revolution, the semiconductor industry will face bifurcation between high-end mobile or smart connected devices (SCD) and the traditional (classic) chips markets.

SCD chips that serve the smartphone, tablet and PC markets are becoming highly integrated, with multiple application processors consolidated into a single IC. These chips are driven by power consumption, performance and time-to-market. In contrast, the classic chip market is serving segments that demand discreet, analog, mixed-signal, RF, IPs and chips that are found in image sensors, MCUs and MEMS applications. These devices are mostly driven by cost as they become commodities.

Trent McConaghy - CTO and co-founder, Solido Design Automation

2013 is the year that 20nm chips ship, from TSMC, GF and others. The big change for 20nm is double patterning (DP), which must be accounted for during design. For example, parasitics between the layers require 15x more corners to be simulated. 2013 is also the year that FinFET-based design on 16nm becomes widespread, followed by 16nm production in 2014. The story for silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is similar. Of course Intel is way ahead; this is what everybody else designs to. Despite their obvious leakage advantage, FinFETs raise many challenges such as different operating characteristics, poor familiarity by designers, and more complex modeling challenges. Variation due to random dopant fluctuation will decrease, but variation due to line edge roughness will remain, and fin depth is a new source of variation.

Shiv Sikand - co-founder and VP engineering, IC Manage

We will see a continuing increase in businesses maximizing their IP reuse across designs and design derivatives. As such, these companies will face an increased need to address the complex dependency management associated with the reuse of these IP design modules - which continue to dynamically evolve with usage.

LSI predictions for storage

1.  The growing impact of solid state storage solutions on enterprise IT will continue - The adoption and deployment of solid state solutions such as server-side PCIe-based flash acceleration cards will continue based on the falling prices for NAND flash memory and their ability to narrow the performance gap that exists between a server’s main memory and traditional hard disk drive storage.

2. Hadoop architectures will gain in adoption as a key technology for enabling Big Data Analytics – Hadoop environments will continue to grow in usage and popularity as companies move away from rigidly structured data queries on traditional high cost servers and toward sorting very large, very complex unstructured data sets across larger clusters of commodity servers.  In order to turn Big Data sets into actionable information, enhancements will begin to emerge to improve the I/O performance of Hadoop to accelerate big data analytics while reducing TCO.

3. Enabling a smarter cloud through “intelligent silicon” - Companies will increasingly turn to cloud computing and highly virtualized datacenters to help manage the rising costs and technical challenges driven by massive data growth. With both network traffic and data projected to grow faster than IT investments, datacenters and mobile networks will need to adopt new approaches to contend with the massive demand, driving the need for “intelligent silicon” that can analyze and prioritize data and help enable a smarter cloud.

4.  Flash is the future of Big Data management - Financial services companies will increasingly leverage the performance of flash storage technologies to accelerate access to data and mitigate delays associated with traditional storage. Flash storage solutions bring the performance needed to quickly traverse massive data sets and extract the full value from data.