The path to growth in semiconductors
Electronics are everywhere. As daily life becomes more digital and more and more devices become software driven and interconnected, the prevalence of electronics will inevitably rise. Semiconductors are what makes this all possible. So, it is no surprise that the entire semiconductor industry is on a path to being a $1 trillion market by 2030.
While accelerating demand will help semiconductors reach impressive gains, many chip makers may be held back by the costs of fabrication (also known as a fab) construction and semiconductor design. Already, building a cutting-edge fab costs about $19 billion and the design of each chip is a $1 billion investment on average. With AI integration on the rise in consumer devices also fueling growth, companies will need to push the boundaries of their electronic design and manufacturing processes to cost effectively supply chips at optimal performance and environmental efficiency.
Ensuring the semiconductor industry continues its aggressive growth will require organizations to approach both fab commissioning and operation as well as chip design with a more unique, collaborative strategy. The three pillars of this strategy are:
- Collaborative semiconductor business platform
- Software-defined semiconductor enabled for software-defined products
- The comprehensive digital twin
First pillar: collaborative semiconductor business platform
Typically, companies use antiquated methods to track roles and responsibilities, causing them to rely on information that can be weeks old. As a result, problem solving can become inefficient, negatively impacting the product lifecycle.
With this collaborative business platform in place, businesses can know the status of their teams at any point during a project. For example, the design team can take advantage of the wealth of real-time data—whether it’s functional verification or static timing closure—to reduce worst-case negative slack. Meanwhile, manufacturing can focus on both the front and back ends of IC manufacturing planning. Once all of this is in place, companies can feasibly build AI metric analysis and a business intelligence platform on top of that.
Second pillar: software defined semiconductor for the software defined product (SDP)
As more and more hardware products are beginning to rely significantly on software, SDPs will become increasingly central to the evolution of the semiconductor industry. And as AI and ML workloads continue to drive requirements, the traditional boundaries between hardware and software will blur.
Success in this new landscape will require semiconductor companies to position themselves as enablers of software innovation through holistic co-optimization approaches. No longer will hardware and software teams work in siloed environments; they will become a holistic engineering team that works together to optimize products.
Improved product optimization from integrated teams works in tandem with the industry’s trend toward more customizable and specialized parts. Consumers are already seeking out customizable chips and they will continue to do so in even greater numbers as general-purpose processors lag expectations. Chip makers need to create environments where they can handle these types of products while getting the requirements right and then drive all requirements in all the swim lanes to develop the product correctly moving forward.
Third pillar: the comprehensive digital twin
Part of creating improved environments to better fabricate custom parts for SDPs is making sure that the process remains affordable. To combat production costs that are likely to rise, semiconductor companies should lean into digitalization and leverage the comprehensive digital twin.
The comprehensive and physics-based Digital Twin (cDT) addresses the challenge of how to weave together the disparate engineering and process groups needed to design and create tomorrow’s SW-enabled semiconductor. To enable all these players to interact early and often, the cDT incorporates mechanical, electronic and electrical software and manufacturing to fully capture today’s smart products and processes. In design, this ‘shift-left’ provides a physics-based virtual environment for all the engineering teams to interact and create, simulate, and improve product designs.
Connectivity is the future
Creating next-generation semiconductors is expensive. Yet, chip manufacturers must continue to develop and fabricate new designs that require ever-more advanced fabrication technology to efficiently create the software-defined semiconductor for tomorrow’s software-defined products. To handle the changing landscape, businesses within the semiconductor industry will need to rely on the comprehensive digital twin and adopt a collaborative semiconductor business platform that enables them to partner both inside and outside of the industry.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
