Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Semiconductor Industry
Artificial Intelligence or AI has been hailed as the next big thing and disruptive trend that is altering every feature of industries globally. In the past couple of years, AI tools and technology have been effectively applied in many revolutionary ideas such as speech recognition, image analysis and so on. The end users of AI comprise manufacturing, healthcare, media, advertising, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFS), retail and automotive. However, the biggest contributors to the AI chipset market has consistently been the automotive sector and transportation.
Digital native companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon , Baidu etc have been working on a range of chip innovations that accelerate the growth of AI. Semiconductor market reports indicate that this research and innovation are slated to accelerate the demand and growth for AI.
To put it simply, AI has a significant impact on the rise for the semiconductor market in two primary ways: creating demand for innovative technologies and improving the fabrication process.
Factors for semiconductor growth and diverse chipset applications
Some of the leading players in the AI market in recent times include Intel, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu and NVIDIA. AI has rightly brought semiconductors back into the limelight. Innovation in AI is largely tied with new semiconductor architecture and computation platforms. Building the AI semiconductor engines of the future needs an innovative range of equipment, design architecture and materials.
In 2018, Google revealed their tiny new AI chips Edge TPU(Tensor Processing Units) for on device machine learning to help enterprise applications improve and automate the quality check of their work. And much like Tesla, many other automakers are engaged in the process of building specialised AI hardware that enables automated driving.
Integrated Circuit or IC market research Report suggests that complexity in the design of automotive integrated circuits is driving semiconductor innovation across this sector. There are many complexities in the design of autonomous cars. Vehicle autonomy depends on the car’s intelligence to gather information from sensors and make split second decisions accurately. Integrating semiconductor technology has been a key aspect in empowering autonomous driving innovations.
Semiconductor chips then become the eyes of the vehicle in the form of the cameras and sensors on the exterior. One key innovation that is driving the application of semiconductors in autonomous driving is ON semiconductor. It can reportedly provide cars with an 8.3 megapixel camera to enable full driverless mode and advanced driver assistance systems.
As AI technology advances the applications have significantly risen from making medical diagnoses, creating new chemicals, recognizing faces of criminals in crowd photos or understanding speech. Semiconductor market research shows that with more innovation and research dollars being invested on further AI evolution, the industry can expect growth as companies leverage semiconductor chips to enhance the performance and power of AI technology.
Semiconductor market data also reveals that a majority of these diverse solutions and emerging AI tech share a common feature — the need for hardware as the core enabler of various features. This is especially true for logic and memory functions.
These future advancements will have a dramatic impact on the semiconductor engineering process too. More importantly, AI will transform the way devices are designed and how they communicate with other semiconductor components.
AI technology stack opens many doors for semiconductor industry
These developments are predicted to go a long way in semiconductor market forecast sales and revenues. There are opportunities for the semiconductor market across the entire technology spectrum.
Hardware AI can allow semiconductor companies to cater to 40–50% of the entire technology stack, marking a new era of demand and growth. While storage is expected to witness a massive growth, semiconductor companies will get the most value in compute, memory and networking.
The semiconductor industry revenue is forecasted to reach 831.5 billion USD by 2024. AI will play a crucial role in growth and leading companies must create a new road map for winning in this AI-driven market.
