Semico is a semiconductor marketing & consulting research company located in Phoenix, Arizona. We offer custom consulting, portfolio packages, individual market research studies and premier industry conferences.
AI is ready to make an impact in a long list of industries and applications. The initial round of AI adoption occurring today involves the replacement of existing SoC solutions with new silicon solutions that incorporate some level of AI functionality. In addition, there are hundreds of new designs that are being tested for new products and applications as part of the new world of artificial intelligence. The performance levels required by these new solutions will vary as dictated by the need of each application. Some require high performance, as is required in automotive applications.
Semico Research and Consulting and the RISC-V Foundation, a non-profit corporation controlled by its members to drive the adoption and implementation of the free and open RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), recently announced an agreement for Semico to author a market research report on the current and future potential of the RISC-V architecture. Scheduled for release in the third quarter of 2019, the comprehensive report will be based on original resea
Due to the significant decline in unit sales during Q1 2019, Semico lowered its wafer demand forecast for 2019 to a 1.8% decline in 300mm wafer equivalents. New research from Semico Research, Semico Wafer Demand Q1 2019 Highlights (MA110-19), reports Q1 2019 total semiconductor units dropped 7.4% quarter-over-quarter and 3.8% year over-year.
The Wafer Demand Summary and Assumptions is a quarterly publication. It includes an excel spreadsheet with annual wafer demand by product by technology from 2010-2023. Product categories include DRAM, SRAM, NAND, NOR, Other Non-volatile, MPU, MCU, DSP, Computing MOS Logic, Communications MOS Logic, Consumer MOS Logic, Automotive MOS Logic, Other MOS Logic, Programmable Logic, Standard Cell, Gate Array, Analog, Discrete, Optoelectronics, Sensors and Digital Bipolar.
With the AI trend emerging, the semiconductor market has gone from a state of lamenting the lack of innovation and new applications to one of seeing an explosion of new possibilities. The short- and long-term impacts on SoC architectures, the SIP market, software, design starts, EDA tools, market revenues and unit volumes are going to be profound.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is anticipated to be the next big market driver that will create new or additional semiconductor demand for a wide spectrum of semiconductor devices. We believe that AI will be integrated in devices from the cloud to factories, homes, offices and vehicles. The application must accommodate mobile and IoT products. The second publication in Semico’s series of AI-related reports and presentations, this report addresses two large markets for AI: the smart home and the automotive markets. Fifteen smart home end-point devices, as well as 15 automotive systems are
published by Rich Wawrzyniak on Fri, 2019-03-15 21:56
This week, Facebook announced it had acquired Sonics, Inc., a 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) vendor. Sonics is one of the mainstays of the SIP market for Interconnect SIP, which is used to tie together the multiple tens or hundreds of SIP blocks found on contemporary System-on-a-Chip (SoC) silicon solutions today. Sonics was founded in 1996 and was at the heart of the emerging SoC market in its early years along with ARC, ARM, MIPS, Analog Bits, Virage Logic and many others.
It is no surprise that a company like Facebook, who is designing their own AI-focused SoCs, would purchase a company like Sonics. While no details of this acquisition have been released, some reasoned insights are possible.
Implications for the Market
This acquisition removes a major player for Interconnect SIP from the market. Sonics’ customers must now determine how long Sonics will support them and at what level. It is reasonable to expect these customers will look to other suppliers for their interconnect requirements.
The semiconductor industry has become adept at taking an already existing entity and breathing new life into it through innovation and new technologies - and recasting it into something much more vital and interesting. The System-on-a-Chip (SoC) market has become larger than the sum of its parts by helping to create whole new markets and applications. In this sense, the SoC has helped turn ideas into a marketable form by facilitating the marriage of functions and features once considered impossible to manufacture on a single monolithic die.
2018 was a good year for the semiconductor industry as manufacturers began rolling out new products targeted at artificial intelligence applications requiring both the most advanced technologies for AI training functions as well as potentially high-volume manufacturing capabilities for edge devices.
The Wafer Demand Summary and Assumptions is a quarterly publication. It includes an excel spreadsheet with annual wafer demand by product by technology from 2010-2022. Product categories include DRAM, SRAM, NAND, NOR, Other Non-volatile, MPU, MCU, DSP, Computing MOS Logic, Communications MOS Logic, Consumer MOS Logic, Automotive MOS Logic, Other MOS Logic, Programmable Logic, Standard Cell, Gate Array, Analog, Discrete, Optoelectronics, Sensors and Digital Bipolar.
