This market is expected to reach nearly $84 billion USD by 2022. This is due to continued strength in mobile and cloud sectors, but also to a projected explosion in AI-based computing and 5G connectivity.

Demands for lower power and higher performance at lower cost continue to drive technology innovation. To meet this demand, advanced FinFET logic technology node scaling plans are accelerating, with TSMCs 7 nm technology already here, and the much-anticipated Intel 10 nm and Samsung’s 8 nm LPP technologies around the corner. It will be interesting to see which foundry takes the lead from a density perspective.

Fully-Depleted SOI technology has also risen as an alternative technology for non-high performance applications, particularly where value-added features such as high-performance analog, RF, and embedded NVM are more important than cost and density. 28 nm class FD-SOI has hit the market and we expect to see more innovative designs on a 22FDX technology platform from Globalfoundries.

There continue to be innovations in the area of microprocessor systems, mostly associated with the growing popularity of the system on chip (SoC). Incremental changes in the architecture, processing cores, interconnects, performance and power management amount to significant advances in SoCs, desktop and mobile CPUs and GPUs, microcontrollers, embedded IPs, and multicore systems.