Partnerships and new product launches to rule the roost in the system on chip industry

System on chips (SoC) have with advanced capabilities have become a need of an hour. With technological advancements in full swing and high demand from users for faster processing speed, SoCs have become specifically designed for gaming and other applications.

Joining hands with firms have great technical expertise for the development of new products is the major strategy adopted by market players. Moreover, chips with gaming capabilities for smartphones have been launched by two major tech giants.

Moreover, smartphone manufacturers have been trying to implement these advanced chips in their smartphone to raise processing speed. The demand for SoC is on the rise with partnerships and new product launches offering better capabilities.

According to the report by Allied Market Research, the system on chip market is expected to generate $205.4 billion by 2023. Following are some the activities taking place that would shape the industry in the coming years:

Partnerships for developing advanced SoC design capabilities:

Joining hands with other firms for bringing better and advanced SoC products is a wise decision to gain major market share and expand into new markets with innovative offerings.

BrainChip Holdings Ltd., the leading AI Edge firm, signed an agreement in with Socionext America Inc. (SNA) for development and production of its Akida Neuromorphic System-on-Chip (NSoC).

This agreement plays a crucial role in bringing Akida NSoC to the market. The partnership will combine different disciplines of engineering and experience in decades of ASIC design with skilled and competent teams of BrainChip in Aliso Viejo, France, and California and Toulouse.

Akida is an AI SoC having a complete edge network that includes on-chip inference, training, and unsupervised learning. It is the first SoC to address AI Edge applications. It supports event-based Spiking Neural Networks and traditional Convolutional Neural Networks.

Socionext is the second-largest ASIC design and development firm of the world. SNA is the American unit of Socionext Inc. The firm would offer turn-key ASIC services to BrainChip for Akida, including the CPU Complex for internal control & data pre-processing, intellectual property (IP) blocks for the external interfaces, IP verification, place & route of the integrated circuit, final logic design, and managing various operations such as wafer fabrication, assembly, and testing.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd (TSMC), a leading semiconductor technology and wafer fabrication firm will provide wafers, powered by its competitive and cost-efficient 28nm CMOS logic process.

Smartphone manufacturers utilized advanced SoC chips:

Smartphone manufacturers have been updating their SoC for addressing new requirements and riding on the wave of advanced technologies.

Samsung has utilized its new Snapdragon 730G chipset from Qualcomm for its new A-series smartphone, Samsung Galaxy A80. This SoC is similar to its SD 730, however, this one has upgraded with some gaming-specific optimizations.

The 8nm LPP manufacturing process has been used in 730G along with equipping it with an octa-core processor having six Kryo 470 Silver high-efficiency cores that operate at 1.8 GHz and two Kryo 470 Gold operating at 2.2 GHz. The chipset utilizes the Adreno 618 GPU for graphics.

Chip giants launching updated and powerful chips:

Qualcomm has not yet ready to launch its new chip design, however, it has been empowering its Snapdragon 855 processor with more capabilities. It has launched SD 855+ chip, which is an octa-core chip having four high-power and four low-power cores.

One of these cores, known as Prime core, has higher clock speed as compared to others for improving single-threaded operation. Kryo 485 cores derived from the ARM Cortex A76 has been utilized, however, the operational frequency of the Prime core has been increased up to 2.96GHz as compared to 2.84GHz in the 855.

however, the clock speed on the other high-power cores is the same, which is 2.42GHz, and the low-power cores are kept at the same speed, 1.8GHz. Its proprietary Adreno GPUs is similar to a black box; however, the Adreno 640 offers faster operational speed. It is approximately 15 percent faster than the one in the Snapdragon 855. Moreover, the 585MHz clock speed has been raised in 855+ up to more than 600. The chip contains the similar X24 LTE modem as that of 855. There are in-built LTE capabilities in SoC. However, the next-generation mobile processor of Qualcomm will have capabilities to integrate the X55 modem for 5G and LTE in a single chip. This integration would help in saving power and make 5G phones cheaper as compared to previous versions.

The Taiwanese chipset giant MediaTek announced its gaming-focused SoC, the Helio G90. It will be launched by the end of July. MediaTek Helio G90 is an SoC chipset focused on gaming applications. The G stands for gaming. This chip will be the part of various series of processors and coexist with Helio A, Helio P, and Helio X series. The trailer has been launched, but the details about its specifications have not shared yet. It is speculated that it will have many specifications similar to Helio P90. Moreover, it will have 12nm Octa-core CPU as that of the Helio P90 along with powerful gaming processing power. The firm aims to become a strong market player in the gaming chipset industry with the launch of this new chip.