Press Releases

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.

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 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.