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.
 

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.

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.