This interview features Bill Finch, Senior Vice President, CAST (Computer-Aided Software Technology Inc.)
Can you describe your company’s founding vision and how it has evolved to address the changing landscape of the semiconductor industry?
CAST was founded in the early 1990s by a group of EDA veterans who were fed up with the typical rat race to get to an IPO. They had seen many more companies fail than succeed by following that path. They founded a company that could support a broad line of products that could be sold around the world with fair pricing, simple licensing with no royalties, and backed up by customer support that left customers delighted instead of frustrated.
This has worked so well for the last 30 years that the fundamentals continue unchanged. Customers today still value the same things that CAST has offered from day one. To be sure, the products have evolved to meet the challenges of today’s technologies. The magic is that we have not gone off chasing things that would not fit with our original vision for how the company should operate. That doesn’t mean that CAST has ceded technological leadership to others. For example, we had the first JPEG2000 core in 2001, we were a leader with our CAN bus cores and the first with CAN FD and now CAN XL and CANSec, and we were the first to verify our TSN Ethernet cores at all of the original TSN plug fests. One of our latest innovations is the introduction of the first of a line of post-quantum cryptography cores based on the NIST FIPS-203 ML-Kem standard. The list goes on and on, but throughout our history, our customer-first focus has never wavered.
What core technological capabilities and innovations differentiate your company and position you for future success in the semiconductor market?
Rather than focusing on achieving bragging rights for some specific technologies, CAST listened closely to an early mentor/advisor who said to stay off the bleeding edge and focus on the second wave. There you can quickly do what customers really want, which is a quality product that does what is intended without all the bugs and mistakes that show up during the ”early adopter” phase of a technology cycle. This approach is a perfect fit for our belief that we have to be able to provide superb support for whatever we are going to sell.
How does your company’s culture and organizational structure support innovation and adaptation to rapid technological advancements?
We’ve already talked about the fundamental company culture, but there’s a notable by-product of a support orientation in a worldwide market: to make it work, you have to be always on, i.e., you have to have a 24/7 attitude and a global structure that supports this. CAST was a remote working culture before that was even a thing. By having people all over the world, we were able to achieve a 24/7 “face to the customer.” We were using email, the internet, and websites in the mid-90s before most people and companies even knew this all existed.
A few years after our founding, CAST started to build a unique product development structure. Keep in mind that a founding principle was to develop a broad product line so that we would not be dependent on any one product or technology. That was a difficult goal for a small private company in the US. Engineering costs were high wherever we looked for talent to expand locally.
To address this and further our vision, we invented a business model that allowed us to provide high-quality products developed by third parties either
independently or to our spec. Here’s how it works:
The end result here is that customers are given access to reliable, great technology, which they would otherwise be reluctant to source from unproven vendors. This structure remains in place, and CAST is well known as a reliable IP partner for new, innovative companies developing leading-edge products.
We have continued to expand our internal development staff and in-house capabilities. Product-wise we have focused over the last few years on providing hardware accelerators to support the move to heterogeneous architectures as well as other essential infrastructure needs.
What were the most significant technological hurdles your company overcame in the past year, and what innovative solutions did you employ?
It is hard to confine this question to just the last year given the continuous acceleration of the rate of technology change. My best answer would be to point to the emergence of RISC-V processors taking the place of proprietary architectures. No offense to ARM et al., but the world revolted against the high prices and even higher royalties required by those guys once a viable, open-source alternative showed up. I realize that it took years for RISC-V to achieve that “viable” status, but it has only been a relatively short period of time and now RISC-V is competitive. CAST has long been a supplier of small, embedded processors (the 8051 is still our single most licensed IP core). We have never chased the high-end, multicore application processors, but the threat to our 32-bit proprietary product line was very real. We responded slightly differently than others. Rather than going all the way back to the drawing board and starting with some open-source model RISC-V, we decided to adapt our proven technologies to meet the RISC-V standards and adapt to the new ISA. This led to a much faster time to market, and now we have a contemporary RISC-V product line that meets all the RISC-V standards and that we can support in the way CAST customers expect.
What are the most pressing challenges currently facing the semiconductor industry, and how is your company uniquely positioned to address them?
I don’t think you can talk about the semiconductor industry as one big, homogeneous market. Semiconductors are a part of the very fabric of our lives across a myriad of markets and functions. For any one company to say they are positioned to address all of this would be disingenuous at best. The global challenges are lower power with higher performance, and lower cost no matter what market you are in. How companies will address this will be a function of the markets they play in and how the technologies in those markets are evolving. CAST will continue to evaluate our best strategies across all our various markets we serve.
What were the key learnings from your most significant project or initiative in the past year, and how will these shape your future strategies?
Since CAST is not focused on any single, make-or-break technology, it’s difficult to provide a single answer. We had significant product wins in several markets such as automotive—where ISO 26262 Functional Safety certification is essential—as well as in the data center market, where data compression is a base technology. We anticipate following these up with new products to address new needs from these customer bases.
Which market segments or applications do you see as having the greatest potential for growth in the next 5-10 years, and what is your company’s strategy to capitalize on these opportunities?
Well, even if you put aside all the current hype about AI, it is almost certain that artificial intelligence will shape the future of the semiconductor industry. The most likely thing is that some flavor of AI will be broadly accepted across all industries in many different forms and functions. The applications that will be developed will be in need of all kinds of supporting IP and that is where CAST has shined throughout the years. CAST’s founding vision of a broad product line has served us well throughout the years, and we believe we are well-positioned to take advantage of the growth brought on by the build-out of new and varied applications.
What emerging technologies (e.g., AI, quantum computing, advanced packaging) will have the most significant impact on the semiconductor industry, and how is your company preparing to integrate these advancements?
We have already voiced our opinion of the major driving force on the overall growth of semiconductors. If we look at the next big thing, it has to be the shift to heterogeneous SoC architectures. The design of chips that are actually networks of functions—each of which is built to achieve the highest performance for that function without being held back by some giant, software-bound processor—is the design revolution we would all be talking about were it not for the AI advancements.
What are your predictions for the evolution of semiconductor manufacturing processes and architectures in the next decade?
As with the AI revolution, this seems to be a fairly easy question: chiplets will totally dominate the way chips are manufactured within the next decade. This enables the realization of the kinds of heterogeneous architectures I spoke of earlier, making them easier to design and build and, most importantly, get to market quicker. There are many details to be worked out, but the leverage from chiplet designs is enormous.
What role do you see your company playing in shaping the future of the semiconductor industry, and what are your key initiatives to achieve this vision?
I don’t think we see ourselves at CAST as a company that is shaping the future. The future is already shaped by the forces I have already discussed. We see ourselves as a proven partner with over 30 years of digital IP expertise that can help our customers maximize their design investments by removing many elements of risk in the areas of design that can get overlooked in the chase after the latest technology. The promise of IP cores was always to remove risk by reusing proven technology throughout a given design. AI, heterogeneous computing and chiplets is not going to change that.
What are the key ethical considerations and societal implications of advancements in semiconductor technology, and how is your company addressing these concerns?
Only someone like Elon Musk would dare to answer this question. As AI applications disrupt entire industries it will not be the semiconductor companies who will be the thought leaders trying to manage the AI revolution so that whole parts of society are not destroyed.
What strategic partnerships or collaborations are crucial to your company’s success in navigating the future of the semiconductor industry?
This goes back to my original comments about how CAST founded a business model based on partnering with innovative companies around the world who needed our expertise in the marketing, selling and legal areas of being a worldwide organization. What we can say is that CAST will continue to seek out the best and brightest engineering-driven companies around the world in the hope they will join with us. Innovation still thrives in small organizations that often fly under the radar of the industry at large. We don’t know what the next one might be, but we are always on the alert and welcome conversations that can benefit CAST, the new partner, and our customers.
