Intel’s announcements at the Intel Developer Forum this week that it will be creating physically smaller packages that can run on far less energy raises some interesting questions about the future of all design. We’ve become accustomed to one-chip implementations, whether that’s a monolithic processor or an SoC with lots of processors. In the future, though, there may be multiple chips, all developed for very specific purposes.

What we’re witnessing isn’t just the return to a collection of chips on a board that were put there because they couldn’t be incorporated into the main logic chip. Instead, this is a well-thought-out, extremely granular approach to what goes where. In many cases, it will be cost that drives these decisions. But at least part of the business decision will be an understanding of how to get processing done the most effectively and with the least amount of energy. In essence, you only add what you need.

Think about a smart phone, for example. The key challenge there is battery life, not performance. If you don’t plug it in at night, or you run applications with lots of graphics, your phone begins showing the red bar of death. Continue using it at your own peril. In this type of setting, the market has been almost exclusively ARM- or MIPS-based. In the future, it could well be based on multiple chips, including Intel-based SoCs, as more performance is added into these devices to make them more useful.

This trend is particularly evident in tablet devices such as the iPad, where streaming video processing is required and where search needs to be sufficiently fast, but where battery life also needs to be sufficient to last through a long user session. In this case both performance and energy efficiency are required, often at a very granular level depending upon user preferences. Instead of an ARM or MIPS processor for efficiency, the ARM or MIPS processors may be the main performers, coupled with an ARC processor or Tensilica DSP for audio and an Intel processor for efficient search.

The semiconductor industry historically has used general-purpose processors with customized software and IP. In the future, designs likely will entail a combination of much more tailored processors that more effectively use even more tailored software and IP. And as simple as this sounds in theory, the impact will be enormous for everyone involved—from design to verification to manufacturing to the end users of the devices.

–Ed Sperling

The importance of Intel’s announcement that it has perfected 3D transistors and will roll them out this year should not be understated. This is a major breakthrough technologically, with major implications for power, performance and even competitiveness. FinFETs have been the subject of some intensive research for more than a decade, with the University of California at Berkeley leading the charge.

This is the first of several major shifts that will begin over the next few process nodes. One will involve lithography, where double patterning and computational scaling will become more prevalent starting at 22nm. The second involves the proliferation of lots more 3D structures on wafers, including everything from multi-gate transistors such as Intel’s tri-gate FinFETs to MEMS devices and 3D memory. A third involves stacking of die, which is expected to bridge multiple process nodes together initially, with more complete modeling and the proliferation of through-silicon vias over time.

What’s becoming clear is that we’ve just scratched the surface when it comes to power and performance. Wide I/O, right-sized processor cores, more efficient software, co-development of hardware and software and better connectivity externally and internally will provide significant boosts in performance while also cutting power consumption. There are huge gains to be made over the next couple nodes in both areas.

What few people are talking about, however, are the physical effects that need to be considered in developing this new breed of chips. Time-to-market pressures will force much more re-use, more concurrent design and more experimentation with new ways of making that happen faster. But in the rush to get chips out the door, there will be all sorts of new challenges to deal with. How do EMI and ESD change in a chip that is densely packed with FinFETs, for example? How do vertical stacks and vertical structures affect noise-sensitive analog IP? And what happens when you start mixing firmware, software and hardware with third-party IP? How does all of this affect timing closure? And what sort of impact will there be from turning on and off segments of a chip that may include lots of 3D structures in a 3D stack?

We have come a long way in verifying the functional aspects of SoCs. The next big challenge will be understanding the physical effects and how to model them effectively. The introduction of FinFETs is a major step forward, but we still have a long way to go to really understand how all the pieces fit together.

–Ed Sperling

Prior to the Synopsys acquisition of Virage Logic, Synopsys seemed to have an almost exclusive relationship with ARM. Since then, Cadence and Mentor Graphics have both been cutting deals with ARM for support of its IP cores.

What’s changed? With regard to the Virage Logic acquisition, very little. Synopsys did acquire the ARC processor through that deal, but ARC had been much more focused on high-end audio and supplying all the necessary codecs that it decidedly was not a threat to ARM. And Synopsys and ARM continue to work closely together on a variety of fronts, both in ARM’s support of Synopsys’ standard IP for things like USB and Synopsys’ support of ARM’s processor IP.

But there has been far more activity between ARM and Synopsys’ top competitors of late. In September, Cadence rolled out an optimized implementation methodology for ARM’s new Cortex-A15 processor.  The two companies also created an ARM-Cadence Encounter reference methodology.  And this week, Mentor inked a deal for test and repair of ARM’s memories and processor cores.

So what gives? The answer may be less about competition between ARM and Synopsys than between ARM and Intel (and to a lesser extent Apple and MIPS). The two companies are about to embark on an all-out war in the tablet market and ARM is doing whatever it can to shore up the Cortex-A15 multicore processor as fast as it can. ARM’s big challenge has been performance, which it apparently has solved with the A15, while Intel’s big challenge is still power consumption. ARM has achieved its goal, and now Intel is racing to come up with a competitor, which it expects to introduce early next year.

While this is a new market for ARM, and potentially a massive opportunity, it’s unclear whether this is really a new market for Intel or one that potentially will cannibalize sales of notebook computers and netbooks. And ARM is wasting no time in marshaling whatever forces it can to roll out multiple generations of chips, IP and anything else necessary to win a piece of this new business.

–Ed Sperling

The announcements out of ARM and Intel over the past couple week—and presumably from rivals AMD, MIPS and even Nvidia in coming weeks—are more than just a struggle for one-upmanship.

The goal is much more far-reaching and the stakes are significantly higher than who has the fastest processor or core or even the lowest-power version. In the past year there has been a massive push to expand ecosystems, cement relationships that are cross-industry, and to venture into adjacent markets as well as solidifying positions in existing markets.

These changes are the result of both economic and technology shifts. The convergence of functions into a single device, or at least a couple devices, is opening up markets on a scale that many companies never dreamed possible. Billions of smart phones can mean billions of chip sales. They also will mean a demand for better tools and ready-fit IP that works with both the gate-first and gate-last process technology at whatever power level is required.

For the design and IP industries, this is very good news in the short term. The demand for faster, smaller and cheaper will require some very complex tools because the problems to be solved are orders of magnitude more complex at each new node. At 22nm we likely will see new materials, new transistor structures, new power management techniques, new interface fabrics, and probably even new techniques for bonding and packaging multiple chips.

How all of this plays out in the long-term, however, remains to be seen. After a massive grab for market share, there ultimately will be some consolidation that reduce the number of market segments, the number of very expensive platform designs and ultimately the number of customers for all the tools and IP that will continue to be needed.

At that point there will be a battle to convince those shrinking number of customers that they need to pay top dollar for the value they’re receiving, because fewer customers gives the bargaining edge to the customer rather than the vendor. This is still a couple nodes off, but it may be time to start thinking about this—and possible adjacent markets that need exploring by both customers and tools vendors.

–Ed Sperling

The continuation of Moore’s Law appears less in doubt than ever. Companies such as Intel, ST, AMD (via GlobalFoundries) and IBM are testing FinFETS and ETSOI and work is being done on the back end to ensure that these new structures can be manufactured with sufficient yield.

What’s changed, though, is the resistance by other companies to the progression of Moore’s Law. There is no longer a sense of resignation that they won’t be partaking in the benefits of advanced nodes. In a 3D stacked die world, it doesn’t matter if the digital portion of the chip—particularly the memory and some of the logic and IP—are developed at 15nm or even 6nm. As long as the analog and some of the IP don’t have to follow the same process node progression, then it no longer matters. The rest is an integration exercise, and much of chip development these days is integration, anyway.

This is a fundamental shift for the industry as a whole, and it will require some significant planning at the system level. While it’s still possible to account for hot spots and signal integrity in a two-die structure, it becomes harder with each new layer. Place-and-route models have to include thermal dynamics, and they have to be built for multiple generations in the future so logic doesn’t sit on top of logic and cook the chip into oblivion. This can all done with some foresight and standardized approaches, of course. It’s what engineers are good at.

It also means more standardized interconnect models, most likely a network on chip type of approach, and better understanding of through-silicon vias and their effect on communication within the chip once they begin shrinking at future nodes. But what’s particularly interesting is that suddenly it brings everyone that abandoned Moore’s Law at 180nm back into the race. That means they will have no choice but to re-enter the market for advanced tools for everything from modeling to verification and software prototyping, and from layout to design for manufacturing.

Stacking die, for all its technological evolutionary roots, is a market discontinuity. And at every discontinuity in the industry there has been a scramble for market share, new tools and new customers. Let the race begin.

–Ed Sperling

Apple’s new iPad is an interesting device not so much because of what it offers to consumers—that’s certainly interesting in its own right—but because of how Apple built the device and why.

Apple has been scouring the market for seasoned semiconductor engineers of late. The process started two years ago when the company hired a team of former engineers from the late Digital Equipment Corp. who migrated first to PA-Semi, aka Palo Alto Semiconductor, and more recently to Apple. This is a rather odd trend, on the face of it, considering most companies have been outsourcing that part of their computer engineering. Apple had abandoned its own chip development efforts in its Mac line because Intel was beating the pants off everyone (which helps explain why Intel has run into so much scrutiny from regulatory agencies).

The folks at Apple haven’t gone entirely mad, however. The first details of its plan to develop its own chip began leaking out when a deal with a large Asian semiconductor company went sour. According to several sources, Apple’s initial iPhone deal called for this Asian company to provide the logic, memory and processor for the iPhone. But after a year of growing iPhone sales, this company also began shipping its own version of a smart phone that had some of the same feature sets as the iPhone.

Word on the street was Apple wasn’t happy. We have no idea what got broken or smashed in this fit of rage, but realize these folks are still reeling from the lawsuit with Microsoft that claimed theft of Apple’s graphical user interface in Windows 3.0. It doesn’t matter that Xerox invented this technology first. Apple brought it to market first, and it put Apple and Silicon Valley on the map. What took much longer was for Apple to establish itself as a brand that cut across business and consumer markets, which is where the iPhone came in.

Rather than risk a repeat performance with Microsoft, Apple began taking its chip development in-house again. It has been competing for engineers with well-known chipmakers in Silicon Valley, and it has been building in the kinds of things that it has been slammed for in the past, like lower power consumption and better utilization of cores.

But will competitive paranoia really drive a re-aggregation trend, or is Apple just so unusual that it will continue to carve its own path? These kinds of trends are best viewed in retrospect, and right now it’s still something happening in the future. The iPad isn’t on shelves yet and so far Apple is still using Intel chips in its Macs.

–Ed Sperling

From the outside it looks like business as usual, but the race for board seats on the GSA has become particularly competitive this year.

GSA originally was created as an organization for fabless companies, but you wouldn’t know that looking at its membership roster. It has evolved into a who’s who of the entire semiconductor supply chain, including everyone from foundries like TSMC and UMC to semiconductor companies like IBM, STMicroelectronics and Samsung to EDA providers like Synopsys and Cadence.

Virtually anyone can become a member of the GSA, and given the list of members it appears that a good portion of the industry has signed on. But you have to get elected to the board of directors, which basically puts you into the center of the customer and supplier ecosystem. The proof is in the attendance numbers. Average attendance at board meetings of non-profit organizations is roughly 50%. The GSA’s attendance is closer to 100%, according to GSA president Jodi Shelton.

For two board seats in two categories there are 13 different executives in the running from as many companies. One is for the broadly defined semiconductor board seat, where 10 different companies are competing. The second is a new category of value chain producers (VCPs), where eSilicon, Global Unichip, and Silicon 360 are each vying for the spot.

While most of this happens behind the scenes—the lobbying for votes with recorded messages and the campaigning to members—what’s interesting is the hidden message behind all of this. The GSA is representative of the industry, and increasingly no company can stand on its own. An SoC isn’t the work of a single company—even at big companies like Intel, IBM or Samsung—which means it’s now increasingly important to be at the center of the ecosystem to remain competitive.

That makes the stakes higher than ever before, and it means GSA elections should become even more hotly contested at every process node—most likely with new spinouts like the VCP definition. And like all complex designs these days, this should get very interesting.

–Ed Sperling

At the beginning of this decade a writer for a powerful newspaper told me that, come hell or high water, she wasn’t giving up print—no matter how important online got to be. I had to think about that for awhile before answering, “It may not be your choice.”

That newspaper is now a shadow of what it once was, but the statement keeps reminding me of some of the brash claims being made by electronics companies today. No matter how brilliant an idea seems on paper, it can be a colossal flop for unanticipated reasons. And no matter how idiotic something may look to established players, you always have to take it seriously. Who would have thought 20 years ago that you could sell a cup of coffee for nearly $4?

Intel’s entry into all markets doesn’t mean it will succeed in those markets. Likewise, just because the market leaders it is challenging now have dominance in those markets, it doesn’t mean they’ll keep it. IBM invented the PC and lost the market to lower-priced competitors. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, but it now owns the market, while its share of the PC market remains small.

What’s getting interesting in the electronics world, though is that battles are no longer being fought by one company anymore. They’re being fought by ecosystems, and how those ecosystems fare against each other is unknown. To some extent it depends on how committed they are to each other. Is this like NATO or is it like the Allies in World War II?

Second, it is uncertain what will win out in technology. Will growth come at the low-end of the consumer market, or will there be enough growth at the high end to sustain more expensive development. To some extent, that depends on how fast developing markets mature and what their consumers are willing to buy, as well as how fast more mature markets recover from a very long and deep downturn.

And finally, it all depends on what sort of business context can be built around all of this. Apple’s genius in the MP3 world was iTunes. What that will be in netbooks, mobile Internet devices, set-top boxes and a variety of new form factors is unknown. And no matter how much money is thrown at solving the unknown, the results may still be unpredictable.

–Ed Sperling

The job market for design and verification engineers seems to be exploding. In the past week, listings have been flooding onto jobs boards for LinkedIn semiconductor design groups. The only trouble is engineers may have to move to get the jobs—sometimes halfway around the globe.

There have been a bunch of job postings for semiconductor expertise in India, the United Kingdom, as well as places like South Korea (home to Samsung and LG), Switzerland (home to STMicro), and a smattering of offerings in Texas and parts of California outside of Silicon Valley. That either means companies are looking to cut costs by hiring workers in less expensive areas, or it means there are a bunch of new companies that have been financed coming out of the downturn to challenge the giants of tech.

My guess is both. That doesn’t mean Silicon Valley will disappear, of course. It’s still the core of innovation in tech, and it likely will remain so for many years to come. But it’s also an expensive place to live and do business, which is why there is a growing demand for expertise in other places.

Over the next six months, as the global economy begins its climb out of a giant economic crater excavated by ruthless bankers, financial traders and insurance companies, demand for jobs will pick up again everywhere. But what’s changed this time is that they’re being back-filled in places with the lowest overhead first, rather than stepping up operations in more expensive regions and then figuring out a way to offshore those jobs later.

The infrastructure for offshoring is already in place. Companies like Intel and IBM already have a major presence in India and China. And in a cyclical industry like semiconductors, you have to wonder what’s going to happen during the next downturn.

–Ed Sperling

The current round of flu will have lasting repercussions on the electronics industry, whether it turns into the kind of pandemic that killed 50 million to 100 million people in the fall of 1918 or whether it proves to be a localized tragedy. We won’t know that for months, of course. The 1918 flu actually began as a relatively mild illness the previous spring before mutating into one of the worst disasters in modern times.

But no matter what happens with this disease, change will be accelerated. Some sectors will emerge stronger and other will suffer. Electronic medical records and the computers and storage needed to handle them will get a serious boost. Already targeted by the Obama administration as part of the economic stimulus plan, this also should provide needed momentum for at-home testing and electronics and a more robust short-range and long-range communications infrastructure.

Also likely to receive a boost are things like videoconferencing and collaborative work environments. Most people don’t want to get on planes if they don’t have to, and most companies don’t want to risk having their employees travel and possibly infect the rest of their office. That provides a huge impetus to invest in new technology. It can even provide a boost for virtual conferences and trade shows. Intel is experimenting with its own electronic trade show next month with its Embedded eVent. http://www.intelembeddedevent.com/

Sales of more advanced phones with 3G capabilities for Internet access also tend to benefit at times when people need more information more quickly than they can get with a simple phone call. The Internet has become a part of life over the past 14 years, and fear can drive a quest for even more information.

At the same time, International trade can take a serious hit. In March 2003, the World Health Organization declared SARS a pandemic, although several months later the danger subsided. During that time, commerce with much of Asia—and even within Asia—slowed to a crawl. Dock workers were afraid to open containers arriving from countries infected with SARS and much of the Asia economy simply stopped for two months.

The effect of that illness proved something of a wakeup call for contract manufacturers, who realized that having all their plants in one country wasn’t such a good idea. It led to significant manufacturing expansion in places like Eastern Europe and—something that should be noteworthy in this time of swine/bird/human flu—Mexico.

Manufacturing is far less rooted these days than in the past, and many major manufacturers are now hedged against disaster with facilities in multiple countries. But what’s different is they don’t control their supply chain the way Henry Ford once did. Any glitch in the production of key products, such as semiconductor wafers, can have a significant impact on much more than just the price of wafers. It can raise the price of electronics across the board, which has a compounding effect up the electronics hierarchy and into the economy at large.

Likewise, in markets where there is strong competition, a flu epidemic can create a huge disadvantage to one company vs. another if it affects either their supply chain or manufacturing capability.

What do you think will happen?

–Ed Sperling