Outlook Supplement - Flipbook - Page 10
Forecast
privacy advantages, and 2026 will
bring even stronger requirements for
hardware-based security. Root-oftrust, secure boot, encrypted storage,
and protected execution will become
baseline expectations as customers
demand trustworthy inference and reliable model integrity. With many edge
devices expected to remain in the field
for a decade or more, long-term support
and secure firmware update paths will
be essential.
Power efficiency will continue
to be one of the strongest decision
drivers. Metrics like inference-per-second-per-watt will guide device selection
as companies work to reduce cloud
traffic, manage operational costs and
lower their carbon footprint. Edge AI’s
ability to process data locally provides
a measurable sustainability advantage
by minimizing data transmission and
extending battery life in mobile and
remote systems.
In 2026, edge AI will mature into a dependable, scalable part of modern system
design. With optimized models, secure
hardware, low-power performance and
strong long-term support, the industry is
ready to move from exploration to real
production at the edge.
Power Efficiency and
Reliability Redefine Memory
Requirements in 2026
SANJEEV AGGARWAL, C E O ,
Ev e r s pin Te c h n o l o gie s
2026 is the year of memory. It will
move from its traditional supporting
role to being acknowledged as a determining factor in system
design. As workloads
grow across edge
inferencing, industrial
automation and satellite
communications, the
limitations of traditional
memory are harder to
ignore. Power, performance and reliability
SANJEEV
AGGARWAL
are now as critical
8
as capacity, and that shift is bringing
persistent memory technologies to the
forefront.
Across every market we track, power
has become the dominant requirement.
AI systems that once relied almost
entirely on processor performance are
now constrained by the energy demands
of the memory subsystem. This is where
MRAM’s value stands out. Its ability
to retain data with virtually no standby
power and wake in less than a second
is meaningful for devices operating at
the edge. A sensor or camera no longer
needs to stay active waiting for an
event. It can remain off, wake instantly,
process locally and avoid the cost and
delay of returning to the cloud. When
customers evaluate the entire solution,
including the power envelope, MRAM
is one of the economical choices.
Industrial automation remains one
of the strongest growth areas. Modern
production lines need deterministic,
instant-on behavior when power is
interrupted. With higher-density
MRAM, programmable logic controllers and robotics platforms can store
more state data at higher bandwidth.
As factories automate more functions,
this requirement only becomes more
important.
Aerospace and defense programs are
seeing similar dynamics. Low Earth
orbit satellites have limited time to
exchange data with ground stations.
They cannot wait for long write times or
risk corrupted updates. That is exactly
where MRAM fits. It gives them a
reliable configuration memory that does
not degrade unlike other non-volatile
memories do under repeated writes or
radiation exposure.
We’re also seeing changes in how
people think about interfaces. They
are moving away from traditional
parallel interfaces because of the area
penalty, and most new designs need
more bandwidth. Octal SPI offers 400
MB per second, and we are seeing early
work around low-power DDR interfaces
| Supplement to January 2026 Semiconductor Digest
as teams look for more speed while
keeping power in check.
Going into 2026, the biggest shift we
expect is that memory is stepping into
a more central role in system planning.
Designers are no longer asking only
about cost and density. They are
asking how quickly they can update
a device, how long it will hold data
without power, and how it behaves after
millions or billions of cycles. Those
questions point directly to persistent,
high-endurance solutions. As power and
reliability continue to define the boundaries of system performance, we expect
MRAM to be part of more platforms
that were never considered candidates a
few years ago.
2026: Power Delivery Defines
Both Limits and Opportunities
EELCO BERGMAN, C h i e f
B u sin e s s O f f ice r, S a r a s
Micro Devices
It’s hard to argue that, as we head into
2026, there is strong momentum in
advanced compute, particularly for the
AI data-center
market. But we
are also facing
an increasingly
unavoidable
reality: System
performance is no
longer limited by
transistor capaEELCO BERGMAN
bility alone. The
combination of
increasingly powerful processors and
accelerators fabricated on next-generation process nodes, higher levels of
silicon integration, and rapid adoption
of heterogeneous packaging is pushing
power-delivery requirements to the
edge of what current architectures can
support.
As devices move into newer
process nodes and into 2.5D and 3D
configurations, we see a sharp rise
in localized power density inside the
device and package. More silicon
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