It's that time of year when pundits try and predict major changes that will happen in 2017. I suppose I'm a pundit, so here are my predictions. I'm at least honest enough to go back and see what I said last year and whether any of those predictions came true! How Did I Do in 2016? Let's start by looking at last year 's predictions: System Design Enablement . In particular, there will be more hardware-software design using emulation. Since every quarter we seem to be shipping record amounts of Palladium Z1, I think I nailed that one; I give myself an A. 3D packaging finally going mainstream . Integrated fanout (InFO) i-technologies are in most high-end phones, I believe. 3D is in volume manufacturing. So I also give myself an A. Designs spreading across nodes. Also, many designs not being done in leading-edge nodes. Leading edge design starts have shrunk, but trailing edge are growing again. I don't have good numbers, though; maybe I give myself a C on this prediction, at least until I can reassess with better numbers. Automotive will be big . As a market, it is still nascent, but you can't move without falling over it. It was everywhere at CES a couple of weeks ago. I give myself a B, but with room for improvement! The democratization of formal verification . Well, it’s slow, but it is more so every quarter. I give myself a C-grade for this prediction. USB Type-C will be everywhere . I predicted it would be at CES 2016, perhaps even on the 2016 iPhone. It is around, but even at CES 2017, it was not ubiquitous yet (and, no, Apple used the lightning connector). So D- grade for that one. What Did I Miss? The big one is RISC-V. I'd heard of it but had no idea how important it is becoming. It was interesting to attend the RISC-V Workshop in November and the RISC-V event that ESD Alliance organized just last week. EUV really seems to be starting to work with impressive up times and throughputs must closer to what HVM requires. Computer learning, convolutional neural networks etc. They also advanced almost unbelievably fast. Security is one of the hottest issues right now, with botnets taking down DNS servers, Yahoo losing a billion records, new attacks like RowHammer becoming better understood. If you read my recent blog Security in 2016 and 2017 , you would know that the Singapore government is taking all their civil servants' machines off the internet completely. I wouldn't have predicted that until the moment I heard about it a month or two ago. 2017 Predictions Security . This will continue to be a huge issue, both at the level of intrusions being detected and at the level of designing chips and tools to better address the issue. IoT designs, done by engineers unskilled in security, will continue to be hacked. Anyone can design a security system that is so strong that...they can't compromise it themselves. That doesn't make it secure. Cars . Automotive, self-driving cars, and the semiconductor technology required to make it all work will become increasingly important. ISO 26262 and functional safety are areas that the EDA companies and semiconductor companies will understand better. RISC-V will continue to gather momentum. There will be lines out of the doors at the RISC-V Workshop in Shanghai in May. 5nm . There will be a lot of talk about 5nm because the decisions really haven't been made how to build it and whether it will be economical when people do. Mergers . There will be more consolidation of semiconductor companies since it is a relatively mature industry now. Last year I made my predictions in December, and one of the things I was trying to predict was technical changes at CES. Well, this year it is already over, so it's rather cheating if I make predictions. Hey, did you know there will be drones? Cars? Big TVs? Summary Security, RISC-V and automotive/machine-vision will be the main things people are talking about. I talked about all of them a lot last year and I'm sure I'll be talking about them more this year. Previous: RISC-V "The thing that you learn and the thing that you use are the same"![]()
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