Press Releases and News

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.

With the artificial intelligence trend emerging, the semiconductor market has gone from lamenting the lack of innovation and new applications to seeing an explosion of new possibilities opening before it. The short and long term impacts on SoC architectures, on the SIP market, on the software market, on design starts, on the EDA market, on market revenues and on unit volumes are going to be profound.

Artificial intelligence in the IoT category-especially automotive, industrial and home automation-has helped boost semiconductor unit sales. Growth in these sectors, as well as in agriculture and smart cities, is expected to further expand semiconductor demand. A new research report from Semico Research, Semico Wafer Demand Update Q3 2018 (MA112-18), forecasts that Automotive MOS Logic units are on track to grow 35% in 2018.
 

It has been true for many years in the semiconductor industry that even very complex applications require a range of design solutions and do not always require the most expensive solution. While it is true that SoCs with the highest design costs probably contain the most complexity, it does not necessarily follow that every product in a given geometry must also incur the same high costs to be competitive. Silicon designers and system architects are constantly looking for ways to reduce their design costs and still meet market requirements and ASP targets.