CEO Roundtable: Chip Reliability Vs. Cost
By Ed Sperling, Semiconductor Engineering
OneSpin, ARM, Silvaco, PDF Solutions, & Real Intent CEOs talk market shifts, higher productivity per engineer and the opportunities for security and reliability.
SE: We can’t just develop one chip and have it run across 100 million units anymore. How do we amortize these costs? Is it chiplets, new architectures, or some other platforms? And what does this mean for the industry as a whole?
Narain: One interesting trend is that a lot of the system houses have started doing their own chips, and a lot of it is for their own internal consumption. If you look at Google, they have the cloud infrastructure. A lot of chip designers have custom applications. It’s just that the scale of computing within a system house is so large that it is now cost effective. The more customized chip design, the better for us, which is why Cadence and Synopsys have been doing so well. If you look at the S&P 500 over the last year, they are in the top 20 as far as their performance. Our industry is benefiting from the fact that there’s a lot of customized chip development.
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‘No one’s going to pay for security bcause I’m not that interesting to a hacker,’ and if you just optimize for cost, then ultimately we lose out on the opportunity that’s in front of us. A data-driven world leads to a lot more efficiencies. So you can’t just focus on the number of transistors. Of course we have to make that as efficient as possible. But we have to think about these issues in a much more holistic way.
