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What a show! Not sure if it’s the weekend attraction of Las Vegas, but CES managed to retain the crowds through Saturday.  Most booths were bustling with curious attendees trying to get a better understanding of the new products and underlying technologies. Once again, the automotive section was quite busy with autonomous driving and electrification of vehicles front and center. While Level 5 autonomous driving is still several years away from reality, all manufacturers are equipping cars with some type of enhanced driving autonomy or assisted driving. In the Ford booth we saw the Ford Lincoln (pictured below) equipped as an autonomous driving car.

The first thing one might notice is that the radar, lidar, and other electronics are nicely incorporated into the body, unlike what you would see in the Google car. The current generation of autonomous driving electronics is quite bulky. It’s somewhat analogous to the mainframes from the ‘70s, when one computer required a large dedicated room.  Clearly, miniaturization needs to happen on the automotive side as the picture below shows the trunk completely packed with electronics.  It looks like we could barely fit one bag of groceries into the trunk. 

As we enter into the new year of 2016 with the worldwide economic cloud of uncertainty hovering like an unregistered drone, particularly in China, CES was still setting records. Bustling with over 170,000 attendees and over 3600 companies displaying their new products, the event was as hectic as ever.
There was a big showing from all the major automotive manufacturers and suppliers. Companies were showing off their new electric vehicles and virtual reality displays of autonomous driving concepts.

Innovations that I found notable revolved around new dashboard layouts and instrumentation displays including avionic heads-up displays that provide the driver with navigational information, safety, speed and personal communication information. In addition, several companies are introducing night-assisted vision systems. The goal of these systems is to provide information and access to accessories without having the driver take their eyes off the road. As well as providing a safer driving experience, these systems reduce drivers’ stress and improve the driving quality and experience.

Even though Tesla has located its battery manufacturing plant in Nevada, and they just recently announced a new vehicle, they were conspicuously absent at CES. . While Tesla is leading the industry in the vehicle electrification race, many of the big players are directly targeting them.

In the past, integrated circuits, packages and boards were all designed independently and yet in most cases still managed to fit together with very few functional or technical problems. However recent advances in chip performance have changed this process dramatically. New designs, processes and materials have already been seen in packaging as high performance semiconductor chips need to carefully match the size, power and performance requirements of more demanding end applications. For optimal system performance, specific information related to material, speed and stability has created the need to improve information exchange and collaboration for successful board design. While collaboration is not new to the industry, we are now at a point where collaboration needs to be extended to all parts of the electronic ecosystem in order to maximize system performance while minimizing costs.

First quarter 2015 is now history, and companies will soon be reporting their Q1 earnings.  Here at Semico we’ve checked the IPI Index against our forecast and year-to-date actuals to see if the industry outlook is on track for 2015.  Here’s the critical review.

First of all, Semico’s forecast for total semiconductor sales in 2015 is $378 billion, up nearly 9% over 2014.  Units will increase to 849 billion representing a 10.5% growth over 2014.  However, there is an upside to this forecast.  DRAM pricing is expected to remain strong as demand remains healthy and more complex fabrication processes reduce wafer output per fab line, limiting the potential for an over-capacity situation.  In addition, the largest memory supplier, Samsung, is slowing its DRAM ramp, i.e. pushing out capex for DRAM capacity.  The memory market has played a major role in the growth of semiconductor revenues over the past two years. 

On a quarterly basis, Q1 2015 is expected to result in a sequential decline of 2.1% compared to Q4 2014 and a 5% year-over-year increase compared to Q1 2014. 

Quarterly Semiconductor Revenues and Units

(In Millions of US Dollars and Units)

Source:  SIA/WSTS and Semico Research Corp.

No matter who you talk to, from material vendors to OEMs, semiconductor equipment suppliers, designers, fabless companies, IDMs, or foundries, IoT is a popular subject. Every industry publication you may read or conference you attend, IOT is at the forefront of every discussion. This was certainly true at DAC last week. I was on a breakfast panel session sponsored by GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Synopsys on Tuesday morning. The big question is, will IoT be the next driver that will take the industry to its next growth phase? There was a lively discussion of the opportunities for IoT. Semico believes that IoT devices will exceed mobile connections by 2018. However, there are some significant caveats that should be pointed out. The main inhibitors that were discussed were:

As usual, this year’s CES was dauntingly huge.  There were thousands of products and over 150,000 people registered.  Semico sent in four fearless analysts to brave the chaos for you and below we’ve laid out five technologies we think you should pay attention to as game changers. 

3D Printing

Over the past several months, Semico has been digging into the pros and cons of additive manufacturing, more commonly referred to as 3D printing.  The 3D printing companies represented at CES have convinced me that this is a revolutionary technology.  It’s my selection for best product at CES. 

A 3D printer is not just a tool for prototypes or a mere plaything for the hobbyist.  3D printers will change our lives.  Need a new set of plates or bakeware, make it with 3D Systems’ CeraJet that works with ceramic materials.  Need a hearing aid?  Make it with envisionTEC’s DDSP System that uses TI’s DLP technology.  And this isn’t just for small items.  The Stratasys Objet1000 features a large build tray of 1000 x 800 x 500 mm (39.3 x 31.4 x 19.6 in.) capable of working with 14 different materials.  3DMonstr is a large, industrial-grade, quad-extruder 3D printer, with the capability of building an object up to 8 cubic ft.  3DMonster is currently on Kickstarter and has already surpassed its goal.   

The System-on-Chip (SoC) market has been successful because of the increasing use of 3rd Party Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP). SoC designers now look to move up a layer of abstraction to design with system level functionality in order to reduce the effort and cost associated with complex SoC designs. By doing so, SoC designers can add higher levels of system functionality and cutting-edge feature sets without needing to design these functions at the absolute lowest level of complexity.

The IP subsystem is a methodology designers are employing to infuse the right level of complexity and functionality to meet rapidly changing market requirements without experiencing a corresponding increase in design costs or design cycle time.
The market entry by Cadence, Synopsys, Sonics and Analog Bits over the past 12+ months marked a turning point in the IP subsystem era. Semico expects to see a competitive market for 3rd party IP subsystems in the follow areas:
• Computing subsystems
• Memory subsystems
• Video subsystems
• Communication subsystems
• Multi Media subsystems
• Storage subsystems
• Audio subsystems
• Security subsystems
• System Resource Management subsystems

The gap between time-to-market and design completion continues to lengthen as chip complexity increases.

Unfortunately, just as design cycle times have lengthened, product life cycles have shortened, a difficult dichotomy to manage. Increasing capability in terms of gate counts and the impact this has on enhancing functionality and feature sets in the end system, is adding to, not shortening, design cycle times. SoC designs are comprised of complex silicon subsystems, aimed at a system-level solution.

One or many high-performance synthesizable CPU cores, DSP cores, GPU cores, a large block of memory, one or more ‘real-world’ interfaces, mixed-signal or analog blocks, high performance on-chip bus structures and embedded API’s or other software are all elements of SoC design today.

The ability to re-use existing Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) blocks over the course of many SoC designs is one way to reduce the design time. Unfortunately, there are many issues to be addressed. One such issue is interoperability between SIP. Another feature of the SoC market is the willingness of established silicon manufacturers to solicit and acquire SIP from 3rd party sources for incorporation into a currently running design or into their SIP libraries.