BY PETE SINGER, Editor-in-Chief
The five hottest areas for semiconductor growth in the coming years are: the Internet of Things (IoT), automotive, 5G, virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR), and artificial intelligence (AI). That was the message from Gary Patton, GlobalFoundries’ Chief Technology Officer and Senior VP or worldwide R&D, speaking at SEMI’s 2017 Industry Strategy Symposium in early January.
The “things” in the IoT — which will be driven by wearables, smart homes and factory automation, for example — are just the tip of the iceberg, Patton said. It’s really upgrades in the infrastructure that will be required to handle all the data produced by these things where the real opportunities lie. The data “has to go up into cloud computing where it’s stored and it’s processed and we do things with it,” he said. The projections for the growth in wired cloud computing and servers is on the order of 30-40% per year over the next five years, he added.
Patton showed a chart the predicts semiconductor value for the IoT/cloud computing is expected to grow from $16B in 2016 to $62B in 2025. Automotive semiconductor value is expected to grow from $32B to $51B in the same time period, 5G to grow from $0 to $20B, AR/VR from $4B to $131B and AI from $5B to $50B.
Patton’s thought when driving in a friend’s Tesla was “this thing’s a laptop on wheels,” a sentiment echoed by other presenters at ISS. Patton said today’s cars have roughly 50 sensors and around $350 dollars of semiconductors. “As we go forward and we get to autonomous cars, there’s only going to be more electronics,” he said.
Patton said that 5G, the emerging 5th generation telecommunications standard, is going to be huge. “The ability to get 10 gigabytes per second and one millisecond latency will be very key for these mission critical applica- tions like autonomous cars,” he said. “You can basically download videos in seconds rather than in an hour.” Patton showed a chart that read “5G is as disruptive to wireless today as data was to voice.”
Another one of the five hot growth areas for semicon- ductors is virtual reality. “This is moving from high end gaming to the mainstream with the advancement of technology,” he said.
Artificial intelligence – also known as deep learning — is seen as another high growth area. ”How do we actually do stuff with the data that’s generated to make useful results?” Patton asked. “That will be a key growth area.”
In terms of what semiconductor technology will be needed for these various applications, Patton said he divides the markets into three parts: clients (mobile, IoT and automotive), networking (5G) and data centers (compute/ clouds). “There’s not one technology that serves all. It’s really going to require a range of technologies to really make all of these different segments and markets work,” he said.