Catalog

Semico Research conducted a survey in November 2020 of RISC-V users. This follows an initial survey and report published by Semico in 2019. With this study, we wanted to quantify the total available market (TAM) for IP cores and estimate the served available market (SAM) for RISC-V IP cores. We surveyed and interviewed a cross section of the semiconductor industry in order to gather information related to the type of devices that are being designed with RISC-V and their target markets.

The semiconductor industry today is faced with several substantial issues—not the least of which are the continuing rise in design costs for complex SoCs, the decrease in the incidence of first-time-right designs and the increase in the design cycle time against shrinking market windows.

Many of the traditional end-use applications are experiencing slower design start growth rates due to maturing markets and high design costs.  The unit volumes associated with all applications remain healthy, exhibiting an 8.5% CAGR through 2023. However, removing the unit shipments attached to the new, emerging applications drops the CAGR to only 4.3% through 2023.

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