Qualcomm

Accellera Systems Initiative is a standards organization well-regarded by the EDA ecosystem that’s also served by the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community. Lu Dai, Senior Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm, has chaired the Accellera Board of Directors since 2017.

Jay Vleeschhouwer, managing director of Griffin Securities, has followed the EDA industry as a leading financial analyst for 25 years and is a popular speaker at the annual Design Automation Conference. Vleeschhouwer discusses his DAC presentation The State of EDA: A View from Wall Street.

Guido D’hert, High Tech and Semiconductor Industry Europe Lead at Accenture, spoke about challenges semiconductor companies face in meeting sustainability goals and how to apply analytics, new green technologies and circular design, sharing during his presentation at ISS Europe in Brussels, Belgium.

Alameda, Calif.-based Verific Design Automation, a member of the ESD Alliance, made its name in the electronic system design and semiconductor industry supporting companies ranging from startups to billion-dollar industry leaders such as Synopsys, Cadence, Siemens EDA, Xilinx, Microchip, NVidia, Infineon, Qualcomm, Renesas and Samsung. Its software is used as the front end to design automation tools such as synthesis, simulation, debug, and formal verification. I spoke with Verific president and COO Michiel Ligthart about homegrown and open-source EDA tools and other recent trends in chip design. Smith: What trends are you seeing in chip design? Ligthart: Semiconductor companies are starting to build a portfolio of intellectual property, including homegrown electronic design automation (EDA) tools, that they want to keep secure and differentiated from their competitors. The increased interest in internally developed and supported EDA tools is a trend we started to see about two years ago. It’s not simulation, synthesis or place and route (P R). Instead, it’s pieces of a chip design flow optimized for a company’s specific needs. In the past, a semiconductor company would either standardize on one EDA company’s chip design flow or mix and match best-in-class tools from different vendors. The common denominator was that they used off-the-shelf products. If they had a specific requirement, they went to the EDA provider for assistance. In today’s competitive landscape, semiconductor companies are figuring out ways to diversify themselves and their design flow became a way to do so. They may not build their own P R tool, but they will look at building their own power domain approach, for example. Is this a widespread trend? It could be. We hear about it within end-user applications ranging from 5G and AI to data center processors and there are probably others we don’t hear about. Power optimization is an example of the kind of specific internal need being addressed. Smith: What are your thoughts about open-source EDA tools? Ligthart: Our industry supports open source already with language reference manuals (LRMs) for VHDL, SystemVerilog, Unified Power Format (UPF) and the RISC-V Instruction Set. The LRMs and the instruction set are free. Moving to the development of actual tools becomes a question of who will implement, support and maintain the tools. Implementation is expensive. The Big Three (Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys) invest about 35 to 40% of top-line revenue into R D. For smaller EDA companies, this number is even higher. The industry may come up with a business model that will have open-source components as well as a way to fairly reimburse companies that make these tools freely available. I have not seen it yet. Smith: Business Insider reports that Verilog HDL is among the top 10 tech skills that companies are desperate for their employees to learn right. Does Verific get asked about Verilog training? Ligthart: No. Our customers are experienced users. Nonetheless, it was great to read that article and it suggests the semiconductor industry is healthy, growing and hiring talented engineers. Smith: If an entrepreneur asked you for advice about starting an EDA or IP company, what advice would you provide? Ligthart: I would tell the entrepreneur to focus on the problem the startup is solving. Stick to the company’s core competency and try not to build in-house what can be purchased from a reputable supplier. In the end, it will save time and jump-start the development effort, and the engineering budget can be allocated to the startup’s core competency. The external supplier presumably has years of product validation, which brings a major QA gain. About Michiel Ligthart Michiel Ligthart, president and COO of Verific Design Automation, has an extensive background in engineering, product marketing and general management. Prior to joining Verific, Ligthart was vice president and general manager of West Coast operations for Theseus Logic, a startup in asynchronous logic. Before that, he spent eight years with Exemplar Logic in engineering and marketing roles. Ligthart started his career with Philips Research Labs in California and was a visiting scholar at the Center for Integrated Systems at Stanford University. He has a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Robert (Bob) Smith is executive director of the ESD Alliance, a SEMI Technology Community.

Companies around the world are increasingly turning to mergers and acquisitions, research and development, and corporate venture capital (CVC) investment to sustain growth. For many years, global semiconductor companies including Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung have been active CVC investors. However, the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic has forced many venture capital (VC) and CVC investors to rethink their investment strategies as they look to an uncertain future. To help provide SEMI members with the latest market trend information, SEMI Taiwan held the webinar Challenges and Opportunities in Corporate Venturing during the Global Pandemic Crisis on April 28th. Featured speaker James Mawson, founder and editor in chief of Global Corporate Venturing, provided an analysis of the pandemic’s impact on deal flow, capital movement, sentiment and strategies among CVCs. CVC takes larger role in past decadeCorporations have been increasingly active direct and indirect venture investors over the past decade. From 2011-2019, more than US$1.3 trillion of venture capital was invested globally, with corporations accounting for more than half that total, according to data from Pitchbook/GCV Analytics.Semiconductor companies that have been active in corporate venturing include Intel, Samsung, Nvidia, ARM, AMD, SK Hynix, Broadcom and Qualcomm. Pure-play semiconductor and chip companies tend to make few investments in their start-up counterparts because sector saturation of powerful incumbents leaves little opportunity for growth, James said. “While it is hard to find entrepreneurs wanting to be engaged in pure play S C, once they do, they can be very valuable and often be able to bring disruptive forces to the whole ecosystem,” James said.S C corporate investors focus on chip applicationsSemiconductor companies looking beyond pure-play S C start-ups for investment opportunities often target applications or developers that require the additional data, processing power, and memory their chips provide. “There is lots of interest by the big chip companies such as Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung in developing some of those chip applications, getting them used more and creating a whole ecosystem,” James said.For example, Intel Capital, based on its data-centric theme, has focused on areas like autonomous vehicles, data centers and artificial intelligence (AI) because of the sheer amount of data and processing power they require. In another notable trend, non-traditional S C players such as Apple and Alibaba are leveraging investments in start-ups to develop their own chips for competitive advantage, James said.March deal flow down 20% With COVID-19 slowing the global economy, James expects semiconductor and chip companies to scale back direct investments this year due to rising pressure on their balance sheets. Deal flow in March was down roughly 20% from February.James is hopeful corporates will focus on investing in innovation over the long term rather than target share buybacks to boost near-term earnings. James pointed out that investors can uncover opportunities by identifying future problems to be solved in areas such as quantum computing, biotech, energy, healthcare, communications and ICT. Still, in the near term, where there is a crisis, there is opportunity. While the pandemic hit some sectors hard, it benefits start-ups in industries including gaming, education and telemedicine. This time is different?James said corporates need to rethink the investment model they want to follow. One option is the approach taken by General Electric, which divested its investment team and sold all its portfolio companies last year. Another is to focus on the long term. For example, Intel Capital has been dedicated to investments in innovation for nearly 30 years and continues to invest during downturns.Compared with the internet bubble and global financial crisis, today there are more experienced and mature CVCs that better know how to negotiate a crisis. James also pointed out investors are interested in backing CVCs with sector investing experience. There are now more than 600 CVCs with a 10-year-plus track record.James expects a variety of funding models to emerge over the next decade as pressure on corporate balance sheets encourages corporate investors to consider models that allow third-party capital to effectively leverage their CVC units. Corporate investors are also open to other ways to efficiently deliver financial returns.For more information about the SEMI Taiwan Corporate Growth and Innovation Community, please contact Irene Lin at [email protected]. For GCV’s latest news and event, visit its website.Jo-Ann Su is senior director of the Corporate Growth and Innovation Community at SEMI Taiwan.

John Smee, VP Engineering, Qualcomm Technologies Inc., will share insights on 5G – which is evolving to enable more reliable connectivity with higher performance in and beyond the era of Internet of Things (IoT) – in his keynote at MEMS Sensors Executive Congress, October 22-24, 2019, in Coronado, Calif.SEMI’s Maria Vetrano caught up with John to give MSEC attendees a preview of his talk.SEMI: Why should MEMS and sensors suppliers stand up and take note of the evolution in 5G, particularly 5G NR?Smee: 5G is the unifying fabric that will connect virtually everything around us. 5G New Radio (NR) is the global standard for a unified, more capable 5G wireless air interface. It will deliver significantly faster and more responsive mobile broadband experiences to users. It will also extend mobile technology to connect and redefine a multitude of new industries, including the IoT.As tens of millions of MEMS and sensors are the core components providing intelligence and interactivity to IoT devices, suppliers need to understand the capabilities and efficiencies that 5G will bring to connect the wide range of MEMS and sensors.We should also recognize that we are at the beginning of the 5G era, and 5G technologies will continue to evolve and expand in the coming years to connect new types of devices in increasingly efficient ways.SEMI: What’s special about the upcoming release of 5G NR, 3GPP Rel-16?Smee: While the first 5G NR release, 3GPP Rel-15, focused primarily on enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), it also established a solid technology foundation for continued evolution in Rel-16 and beyond.With Rel-16, we are seeing 5G NR’s expansion beyond eMBB to address new tiers of IoT services such as industrial IoT (e.g., automation) with ultra-reliable, low-latency communication (URLLC) and cellular vehicle-to-everything (C-V2X) for more advanced use cases, such as autonomous driving. MEMS and sensors are critically important to both types of use cases as they collect the raw information of the physical world, and 5G is the connectivity of these sensors to the network. This makes the technologies inextricably linked.MEMS and sensors are equally integral to the development of more efficient low-complexity massive IoT devices (MIoT) with in-band 5G NR deployments of enhanced machine-type communication (eMTC)/narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and the use of the new 5G Core Network. In practical terms, devices that enable smart city use cases – such as smart utility monitoring, connected parking meters, and smart street lighting solutions that support 3GPP Rel-16 – are MIoT devices that will delight city administrators and dwellers with their improved coverage and efficiency. SEMI: In addition to low-complexity MIoT devices, what other markets will benefit most from the evolution in 5G NR?Smee: We continue to enhance 5G NR to support the high-performance IoT, including URLLC.URLLC is one of the many new 5G capabilities that wasn’t possible with the previous generation of cellular technologies, such as LTE. Because it delivers services at very high reliability (i.e., 99.9999%) and ultra-low latency (i.e., sub-1ms), URLLC literally opens up new use cases that that only wired communication could serve in the past. Industrial IoT applications that require a mix of high reliability and low latency, such as robotic arm command and control, are foremost among these new URLLC use cases.Another example of IoT taking advantage of URLLC is smart grid, where faults in the electricity distribution network require immediate protection and control to ensure safety and avoid equipment damage.SEMI: How is Qualcomm building on the eMTC/NB-IoT for low-power wide-area IoT (LPWA) – and how will this influence IoT connectivity?Smee: We continue to evolve eMTC/NB-IoT beyond its initial 3GPP release in Rel-13, making these foundational LPWA IoT technologies more capable and efficient as they become the basis for 5G massive IoT.The most significant updates to eMTC/NB-IoT include multi-cast and positioning support in Rel-14 and improved spectral/power efficiencies in Rel-15. Multi-cast can help service providers to deliver firmware updates over the air with greater efficiency, which speeds deployment of new features. Positioning can create new values, which can inform end users where their assets/packages are located, potentially safeguarding assets in transit. Improving spectral/power efficiencies offers more power-efficient transmissions, which takes less toll on battery-operated devices.With Rel-16, we have further optimized eMTC/NB-IoT, which is supported by the new 5G Core Network and is also deployable in 5G spectrum in-band with other 5G NR services.The evolutionary path ahead for eMTC/NB-IoT enables support for an even wider range of 5G massive IoT devices. New enhancements in the pipeline, such as grant-free uplink and multi-hop mesh, will boost efficiency and coverage area that much more.SEMI: Where do mobile broadband devices such as ultra-high-definition (UHD) security cameras fall within Qualcomm’s realization of 5G-NR?Smee: Mobile broadband is at the core of 5G NR. We see it both powering the new generation of 5G smartphones and expanding beyond traditional devices (including always-connected PCs and tablets) to address the needs of high-performance IoT devices such as UHD security cameras.It’s actually an important part of our vision for 5G to have an industrial network that requires all types of 5G connectivity for devices spanning eMBB (e.g., cameras, laptops), URLLC (e.g., machines) and MIoT (e.g., sensors).SEMI: What can the MEMS and sensors industry do to prepare for the 5G wave?Smee: Because 5G can evolve to deliver even better performance and efficiency for connecting sensors in the 5G world, we will see even more widespread adoption of MEMS and sensors into larger numbers of connected applications. MEMS and sensors suppliers, therefore, need to get ready for the 5G wave by preparing to support 5G connectivity in their devices, which will ultimately help to realize the 5G vision of connecting virtually everything in the world around us.John Smee, Ph.D., is vice president of engineering at Qualcomm Technologies Inc., where he is the 5G R D lead responsible for overseeing all 5G research projects, including end-end systems design and advanced RF/HW/SW prototype implementations in Qualcomm’s wireless research and development group. He joined Qualcomm in 2000, holds over 100 U.S. Patents, and has been involved in the design, innovation, and productization of wireless communications systems such as 5G NR, 4G LTE, 3G CDMA, and IEEE 802.11. He also leads Qualcomm’s companywide academic collaboration program across technologies including wireless, semiconductor, multimedia, security and machine learning. John was chosen to participate in the National Academy of Engineering Frontiers of Engineering program and received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University and also holds an M.A. from Princeton and an M.Sc. and B.Sc. from Queen’s University.Smee will present Evolving 5G NR to Connect the Internet of Things on Wednesday, October 23, 2019, at MEMS Sensors Executive Congress, Coronado Island Marriott Resort Spa in Coronado, Calif.Register today to learn how 5G NR will transform the user experience with MEMS- and sensors-enabled devices in IoT, automation and beyond.Interested in engaging with the MEMS and sensors supply chain? MEMS Sensors Industry Group is a SEMI technology community that enables the MEMS and sensors industry to innovate, address common challenges and accelerate business results.Maria Vetrano is a public relations consultant for SEMI.