Fundamental Shifts in 2018
By Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
This will go down as a good year for the semiconductor industry, where new markets and innovation were both necessary and rewarded.
What surprised the industry in 2018? While business has been strong, markets are changing, product categories are shifting and clouds are forming on the horizon.
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But many people at least got a piece of this right. “We said that machine learning (ML) would present many new challenges for systems, semiconductor and EDA suppliers,” said Sergio Marchese, technical marketing manager at OneSpin Solutions. “Specific to EDA, we predicted that ML and AI would lead to an evolution in design practices and development tools. We are still in the early phases of this transition, but some changes are already clear. The statistical nature of ML means that bugs are more data-driven, leading to a new emphasis on verification of datapaths in addition to control logic. The floating-point unit formal app that we recently introduced is one example of this evolution.”
