Each year, Semiconductor Digest turns to industry leaders and analysts to get their viewpoints on what they expect to see in the coming year in terms of critical tech and business trends. For 2022, in addition to ongoing technical advances, expect to see a focus on supply chain challenges, sustainability, the workforce shortage and reshoring.

Bipul Talukdar, Director of Applications Engineering for North America, SmartDV

Semiconductor Digest | December 2021 Issue

All Hail Design and Verification IP!

Blocks of cores used in chip design are one of many practical advances. Chip developers would be lost without the availability of a broad and plentiful selection of high-quality, standard protocol design and verification IP. All applications markets across the semiconductor industry now benefit from blocks of IP cores, be it mobile, networking, SoC, automotive, storage, video, memory or mil/aero. These latter day “black boxes” are used by engineers seemingly without any knowledge of their internal workings, saving precious project cycles and increasing cost efficiencies.

Some prevailing trends to watch in 2022:

• The growing use of design IP indicates that time to market drives companies to third-party vendors for design blocks instead of internal development. It points to need for highly configurable or customizable design IP for better area and performance and a quick customization capability.
• The competition between Arm and RISC-V CPU core providers is forcing core providers to offer easi-er-to-use solutions for highly demanding applications like AI, M/L and storage with emphasis on low power.
  The one who supplies a smooth, pro-ductized acceleration-based method for high-performance computing will likely be the winner.
• The popularity of the RISC-V architecture with its easily customizable instruction set and open-source core productization offers opportunities for turnkey solutions for open-source core productization services, partner ships between productized open-source core providers, FPGA houses and Design IP houses.
• Availability of more IP blocks, more design integration and verification indicates the need for more investment Verification services are becoming more commonplace as are FPGA turnkey services for post-silicon validation and soft-core lightweight CPUs on FPGAs for validation of post silicon design under test.

It doesn’t take a fortune teller gazing into a crystal bal to predict a bright future for IP in chip design in 2022 or beyond. Availability of proven IP is critical and will continue to be to the design and verification of semiconductor chip and SoC projects.

Read the full article, with viewpoints from other industry luminaries, on Semiconductor Digest