AI/ML, 3DIC and quantum computing to come to the fore in 2025
Author : Nilesh Kamdar, Keysight Technologies
27 June 2025
Nilesh Kamdar, Senior Design and Verification Business Unit Lead of Keysight EDA, Keysight Technologies
According to Nilesh Kamdar, Senior Design and Verification Business Unit Lead of Keysight EDA, three technology areas play prominent roles in the research and development landscape in 2025.
Widespread AI/ML adoption boosts productivity
Businesses and individuals will move artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions from the curious and interesting to the inevitable. Broad adoption will drive productivity improvements and true innovation. In the engineering and design space, AIML solutions will move from the digital to the analogue and make a bigger impact on RF/Analog designers. Generative AI will impact the design community, where ML-based synthesis solutions will help create new and unique designs. Businesses will hire data specialists and assign Chief Data Officers to focus on the fuel that drives all AI/ML work: DATA. The impact on productivity will improve across all functions due to advancements in AI/ML.
Maturing HI/3DIC ecosystem represents new opportunities
Chiplet and 3DIC solutions will continue to become more mainstream. You can expect additional packaging houses to join the Chiplet ecosystem and help to standardise many aspects of design, and collaboration. Advanced packaging techniques, including heterogeneous integration, will give a technological and business advantage to system companies, which will continue to attract investment in this space. The design solutions for creating 3DIC/HI designs will mature, with system designers being able to do upfront design and trade-offs more easily.
Mainstream photonics gives way to quantum
The push towards generative AI solutions means that traditional computing has to re-invent itself and produce exponential throughput. Traditional electronic solutions are running out of steam, and the first breakthrough on the horizon is silicon photonics and more optical communications. Some level of optical communications is already prevalent today (for example, trans-continental communications are done via underwater fibre-optic cables), but with the advent of silicon photonics will start replacing short-haul transport. In 2025, photonics solutions will become mainstream and drive investments and hiring in this space. Semiconductor foundries will innovate with newer process variants and help drive the ecosystem forward.
The final frontier after photonics is quantum computing. This is an exciting area of research, and we already have quantum computers that can handle more than a thousand qubits. With the pace of research and innovation, ten thousand qubits are just a few years away. Quantum research will spread to more countries (especially Asia) as no region wants to cede any computing advantage to another.
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