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hill Christie from imec IC-link
talked to three experts from
imec IC-link’s IP & Design Partnership
Program: Ramses Valvekens from
system-on-chip design company
Easics, Jeroen Van Ham from analog
and mixed-signal design company
ICsense, and Bart Keppens from
Sofics, a provider of intellectual
property (IP) for electrostatic
discharge protection. Together, they
take a snapshot of what is needed
to innovate with hardware in today’s
substream markets.
Until recently, building hardware was
not cool. With lengthy development
cycles and a huge upfront investment
for custom ICs, innovators have long
turned to software to develop new
products. But today a new generation
of hardware hipsters has arrived.
They build today’s smart systems
that interact intelligently with their
environment. Systems for small
innovative markets, which they can
deliver faster, more flexible, and with
lower upfront investments.
Is hardware cool again?Foratleastthelasttwodecades,custom
integrated circuits were implemented
in leading edge technologies with
development cycles longer than the
shelf-lives of the products. It was
punishingly expensive if you made
a design mistake, and the upfront
investments needed for leading
edge silicon technology were eye-
watering. Developing these custom
ICs was therefore almost exclusively
the playing field of large multinational
semiconductor companies with deep
pockets. Innovation in the global
markets of consumer, computing,
telecom and mobile was necessarily
characterized by generation after
generation of incrementally better
products, based on IP-portfolios that
took large teams several years to
develop.
But today’s new generation of
hardware hipsters are pushing the
boundaries of what you can do with
hardware; with systems that perceive
their surroundings and start thinking
about their environment with their
cloud-based brains. Commenting
on this, Joi Ito, director of the MIT
Media Lab, said that “hardware is
the new software” and that hardware
start-ups are looking a lot like the
software start-ups of the previous
digital age. They are aggressively
targeting innovative new Internet
Of Things (IoT) markets, such as
life sciences and medical diagnosis,
automotive, security, vision and
imaging, and industrial applications.
These are rapidly growing, much
more segmented and with a need for
specialized lower-volume ASICs. So
here the economies of scale which
favor larger companies do not play.
Progress, change and innovation
under these conditions does not
P
The New Hardware Hipsters INNOVATE WITH
HARDWARE IN TODAY’S SUBSTREAM MARKETS
Ramses Valvekens, Bart Keppens, Phill Christie, Jeroen Van Ham
New-Tech Magazine Europe l 20