2025 Outlook with Volker Politz of Semidynamics

Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. 

I am the Chief Sales Officer and I lead the global sales team and drive the overall sales process. Semidynamics was founded 2016 as a design service company with a focus on RISC-V. This was so successful that the CEO decided to pivot the company towards its own IP sales and started licensing IP from 2019.

We provide the world’s only, fully customisable, 64-bit RISC-V processor IP which is complimented with our leading-edge vector unit and tensor unit extensions. We have combined these technologies together to form our All-In-One AI IP that provides a much better way forward for AI projects as it is future-proof, easy to program and easy for us to create the exact hardware needed for a project. In addition, it incorporates our Gazzillion technology for advanced data handling to ensure that the processor is never idle waiting for data. When it comes to handling large amounts of data, we have the fastest, best-in-class solution for big data applications.

What was the most exciting high point of 2024 for your company? 

The highlight was being able to publicly announce that our customer, UPMEM, selected our IP to run its large language models. This has brought in enquiries from other fabless semiconductor companies that also want to license our breakthrough, All-In-One AI IP, which we launched this year, for their products.

What was the biggest challenge your company faced in 2024? 

The overall economic weakness hits big companies and small companies as well delaying spending, cutting budgets and re-thinking projects. As a result, business contracts that we anticipated to close in 2024 have shifted to early 2025. 2025 is looking more promising, especially driven by growing global interest in processors for AI that aren’t GPUs.

How is your company’s work addressing this biggest challenge? 

We liaise closely with our customers to customise our offering to their precise needs. In addition, we encourage them to engage early with us to avoid gaps in the product plans later on. We are a strategic partner with a long term view ourselves.

What do you think the biggest growth area for 2025 will be, and why?

‘Anything AI’ is still driving a lot of new products – especially generative AI, large language models – because it makes possible a whole new set of features to drive innovation. I’m always surprised when people suggest AI might be a bubble. Let us be clear: AI will be the main driver of chip sales and product developments from 2025 to 2030.

How is your company’s work addressing this growth? 

We are the only company that can precisely tailor the IP elements in our All-In-One AI to each customer’s exact needs. Other companies just offer limited options to configure not truly customise. Plus, we can open up the core to add unique instructions for differentiation and to protect the customer’s ‘secret sauce’.

We also have a software support strategy for AI that is based on ONNX, which makes the need for dedicated compilers obsolete and enables the customer to run a model they download in ONNX format to run out of the box. This helps them to move quickly to a final product as software and hardware can be developed in parallel.

What conferences did you attend in 2024 and how was the traffic?

We attended various RISC-V.org events as well as dedicated events such as ICCAD in China, Embedded World in Germany and Supercomputing Conference in Germany. We also presented at RISC-V day in Japan and attended the IoT conference in Spain.

Traffic was mixed as some of those events were more specific than others. As a result, there were ten times more people in a China event compared to one in Germany.

Will you attend conferences in 2025? Same or more?

We aim to attend some new conferences to spread the word that our RISC-V IP can provide the processor needs for new projects as well as attending some of the events that we have previously attended. There is a huge wave of RISC-V being increasingly used as a viable, exciting alternative to the two processor incumbents and we are surfing that wave.

How do customers engage with your company?

Customers can engage with our sales force or via contacts on our website and other sites where we post adverts. Once established, we have dedicated resources to facilitate the evaluation process and subsequent product selection and purchase. Or they can message me directly on LinkedIn. I don’t mind at all – hearing from new customers makes my day.

Additional questions or final comments? 

We consider ourselves as leaders in high performance, AI-enabled IP for high data workload applications. We expect increasing demand around ‘Anything AI’ in segments such as data center appliances, vision processing such as security cameras, mobile base stations and software defined vehicles and we are ideally positioned with our All-In-One AI IP to be the solution of choice.

Also Read:

Semidynamics: A Single-Software-Stack, Configurable and Customizable RISC-V Solution

Gazzillion Misses – Making the Memory Wall Irrelevant

Semidynamics Shakes Up Embedded World 2024 with All-In-One AI IP to Power Nextgen AI Chips