The prospect of billions of connected devices using sensors to collect data 24/7-along with the innovations and cost-reduction provided by MEMS devices-has stimulated increased interest in finding a cost-effective, portable energy harvesting solution. The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to grow at a high rate driven by connectivity across many market segments. In addition to portable applications, many IoT applications will be battery-operated.

Semiconductor sales improved in the second half of 2019 as expected but not enough to counteract the severe drop that occurred in the first half. Although dollar and unit sales declined for the year, both memory and logic showed signs of improvement in the second half.

The semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) market has become an integral part of the semiconductor industry. Third party IP has propelled the industry, opening the door for many new products from start-ups to established IDMs. Enabling increasingly complex devices, reducing the cost of product development and reducing the time to market for both leading-edge and mature products are just a few of the benefits of third party IP. Open architecture IP allows users to customize and adapt cores to their own specific applications and provide the opportunity for unique differentiation.

For the most part, third party IP uses a business model that employs licensing and royalty fees. This payment arrangement has been successfully adopted by most market players and has matured with the IP market. In general, this IP model has allowed the market to be highly successful even though some IP has been constrained by the rules and regulations of closed architectures. Over the years, some users of IP have become disgruntled with the lack of design flexibility and the high licensing fees and royalties associated with closed architectures.

The term energy harvesting, also known as power scavenging, is used to describe the collection of energy derived from a variety of external sources such as solar power, thermal energy, wind energy, kinetic energy or electromagnetic sources. Energy harvesters accumulate the wasted energy in a system, such as heat given off by motors or the vibrations of motors or other moving objects. The basic technologies for generating energy are mechanical vibration (kinetic energy), thermoelectric, solar (photovoltaic), and RF/Inductive.

The evolution of the 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) market was driven by the needs of System-on-a-Chip (SoC) designers to find and acquire logic functions as IP blocks to match the functions they needed for their SoC solutions. This resulted in the SIP market taking very specific directions to deliver these needs. There has been consolidation in the market, but new companies continue to emerge, bringing new ideas and products to designers.