Category Archives: Device Architecture

Top five product segments driving the first annual double-digit IC market upturn since 2010.

IC Insights has revised its outlook and analysis of the IC industry and presented its new findings in the Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2017, which originally was published in January 2017. Among the revisions is a complete update of forecast growth rates of the 33 main product categories classified by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics organization (WSTS).

ICInsights1

Figure 1 shows the complete ranking of IC products by forecasted growth rate for 2017. Topping the chart of fastest-growing products is DRAM, which comes as no surprise given the strong rise of average selling prices in this segment throughout the first half of 2017.  IC Insights now expects the DRAM market to increase 55% in 2017 and lay claim as the fastest-growing IC product segment this year. This is not unfamiliar territory for the DRAM market.  It was also the fastest-growing IC segment in 2013 and 2014. Remarkably, DRAM has been at the top and near the bottom of this list over the past five years, demonstrating its extremely volatile nature (Figure 2).

ICInsights2

The Industrial/Other Special Purpose Logic segment is projected to grow 32% and two automotive-related IC categories—Automotive Special Purpose Logic (48%) and Automotive Application Specific Analog (18%)—are also on course for growth that will exceed the 16% expected of the total IC market. There are more IC categories that are forecast to show positive growth in 2017 (29) compared to 2016 (21), but only the top five market segments mentioned above are forecast to exceed the total IC market growth in 2017, indicating top-heavy market growth. Another five segments (two analog categories, two MCU segments, and Computer and Peripherals—Special Purpose Logic) are forecast to show double-digit growth in 2017, though less than the 16% forecast for the total IC market this year.

Additional details and discussion regarding the updated IC forecasts for the 2017-2021 timeperiod are covered in IC Insights’ Mid-Year Update to The McClean Report 2017.

In their recent global memory cards market report, Technavio announced that the market for memory cards will reach $9.025 billion by 2021. That’s up from $8.83 billion in 2016, a CAGR of approximately 0.45%.

Important factors that impede the market growth are enhanced in-built memory capacity in smartphones and proliferation of the cloud. The market deceleration is further enhanced by the decrease in average selling price of memory cards. Technology advances like faster read/write speed, enhanced durability, smaller form factors, and improved cost efficiency, have helped sustain the use of memory cards in smartphones and cameras.

Competitive vendor landscape

The global memory cards market consists of players that are well established in the global memory products and solutions market. Apart from storage capacity, compatibility, and reliability of stored data, vendors in the market are unable to showcase any other major variation in their products.

Top eight memory card market vendors

SanDisk

SanDisk is engaged in the manufacture and distribution of hardware storage products. It offers flash storage card products for a broad range of electronic systems and digital devices. Technologies used for developing flash storage card products include flash memory, controller, and firmware. The company provides its products to the mobile phone, consumer electronics, and computing markets.

Kingston Technology

Kingston Technology is one of the top manufacturers of memory modules, such as printed circuit boards with dynamic RAM, which increases the speed and capacity of computers and printers. The company focuses on capitalizing the potential markets by developing better products following a sustainable growth strategy.

Lexar (Micron Consumer Products Group)

Lexar is a fully owned subsidiary of Micron Consumer Products Group. Micron Consumer Products Group is the largest manufacturer of memory chips in the world. Lexar’s product lineup includes memory cards, USB flash drives, readers, and storage devices for original equipment manufacturers and retailers.

ADATA Technology

ADATA Technology is a Taiwanese storage and memory device manufacturer. Its product portfolio includes USB drives, dynamic RAM modules, and memory cards. It also caters to express cards, solid-state drive (SSD), and digital frame market.

Transcend Information

Transcend Information designs, develops, manufactures, and sells memory modules, flash cards, USB drives, external hard drives, multimedia products, and accessories. The company makes consumer products like memory cards, adapters, portable devices, USB flash drives, external hard drives, SSDs, digital photo frames, memory modules, digital music players, card readers, and wireless and multimedia products.

Samsung Group

Samsung Group is one of the world’s largest semiconductor manufacturers and is the leading electronics company in South Korea. Samsung Electronics, a subsidiary of Samsung Group, is a pioneer in electronic products. It manufactures different consumer devices that include DVD players, digital still cameras, digital TVs, color monitors, computers, printers, and LCD panels. It offers semiconductors like static RAM, dynamic RAM, display drivers, and flash memory.

Sony

Sony is a major vendor in the memory cards market. It focuses on consumer and professional electronics in divisions such as entertainment, gaming, and financial service sectors. It is among the top 20 worldwide semiconductor sales leaders. It has segmented itself into three sectors, namely growth drivers, stable profit generators, and laggards.

Toshiba

Toshiba is involved in the R&D, sales, and manufacture of electronic and electric products. It sells storage devices under the electronic devices business domain. The company’s technology leadership, product diversification, and broad customer portfolio enabled it to become one of the leading players in the global memory cards market. One of the major growth strategies of the company is to expand its product portfolio continuously. The company primarily focuses on its R&D and engineering, and continuously invests to leverage its technology for better sales.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. has announced new V-NAND (Vertical NAND) memory solutions and technology that will address the pressing requirements of next-generation data processing and storage systems. With the rapid increase of data-intensive applications across many industries using artificial intelligence and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, the role of flash memory has become extremely critical in accelerating the speed at which information can be extracted for real-time analysis.

At the inaugural Samsung Tech Day and this year’s Flash Memory Summit, Samsung is showcasing solutions to address next-generation data processing challenges centered around the company’s latest V-NAND technology and an array of solid state drives (SSDs). These solutions will be at the forefront of enabling today’s most data-intensive tasks such as high-performance computing, machine learning, real-time analytics and parallel computing.

“Our new, highly advanced V-NAND technologies will offer smarter solutions for greater value by providing high data processing speeds, increased system scalability and ultra-low latency for today’s most demanding cloud-based applications,” said Gyoyoung Jin, executive vice president and head of Memory Business at Samsung Electronics. “We will continue to pioneer flash innovation by leveraging our expertise in advanced 3D-NAND memory technology to significantly enhance the way in which information-rich data is processed.”

Samsung heralds era of 1-terabit (Tb) V-NAND chip

Samsung announced a 1Tb V-NAND chip that it expects to be available next year. Initially mentioned in 2013, during unveiling of the industry’s first 3D NAND, Samsung has been working to enable its core memory technologies to realize one terabit of capacity on a single chip using a V-NAND structure.

The arrival of a 1Tb V-NAND chip next year will enable 2TB of memory in a single V-NAND package by stacking 16 1Tb dies and will represent one of the most important memory advances of the past decade.

NGSFF (Next Generation Small Form Factor) SSD to improve server storage capacity and IOPS

Samsung is sampling the industry’s first 16-terabyte (TB) NGSFF SSD, which will dramatically improve the memory storage capacity and IOPS (input/output operations per second) of today’s 1U rack servers. Measuring 30.5mm x 110mm x 4.38mm, the Samsung NGSFF SSD provides hyper-scale data center servers with substantially improved space utilization and scaling options.

Utilizing the new NGSFF drive instead of M.2 drives in a 1U server can increase the storage capacity of the system by four times. To highlight the advantages, Samsung demonstrated a reference server system that delivers 576TB in a 1U rack, using 36 16TB NGSFF SSDs. The 1U reference system can process about 10 million random read IOPS, which triples the IOPS performance of a 1U server equipped with 2.5-inch SSDs. A petabyte capacity can be achieved using only two of the 576TB systems.

Samsung plans to begin mass producing its first NGSFF SSDs in the fourth quarter of this year, while working to standardize the form factor with industry partners.

Z-SSD: optimized for systems requiring fast memory responsiveness

Following last year’s introduction of its Z-SSD technology, Samsung introduced its first Z-SSD product, the SZ985. Featuring ultra-low latency and high performance, the Z-SSD will be used in data centers and enterprise systems dealing with extremely large, data-intensive tasks such as real-time “big data” analytics and high-performance server caching. Samsung is collaborating with several of its customers on integrating the Z-SSD in upcoming applications.

The Samsung SZ985 requires only 15 microseconds of read latency time which is approximately a seventh of the read latency of an NVMe SSD. At the application level, the use of Samsung’s Z-SSDs can reduce system response time by up to 12 times, compared to using NVMe SSDs.

With its fast response time, the new Z-SSD will play a pivotal role in eliminating storage bottlenecks in the enterprise and in improving the total cost of ownership (TCO).

New approach to storage with proprietary Key Value SSD technology

Samsung also introduced a completely new technology called Key Value SSD. The name refers to a highly innovative method of processing complex data sets. With the sharply increasing use of social media services and IoT applications, which contribute to the creation of object data such as text, image, audio and video files, the complexity in processing this data increases substantially.

Today, SSDs convert object data of widely ranging sizes into data fragments of a specific size called “blocks.” The use of these blocks requires implementation processes consisting of LBA (logical block addressing) and PBA (physical block addressing) steps. However, Samsung’s new Key Value SSD technology allows SSDs to process data without converting it into blocks. Samsung’s Key Value instead assigns a “key” or specific location to each “value,” or piece of object data – regardless of its size. The key enables direct addressing of a data location, which in turn enables the storage to be scaled. Samsung’s Key Value technology enables SSDs to scale-up (vertically) and scale-out (horizontally) in performance and capacity. As a result, when data is read or written, a Key Value SSD can reduce redundant steps, which leads to faster data inputs and outputs, as well as increasing TCO and significantly extending the life of an SSD.

 

GLOBALFOUNDRIES today announced that it has demonstrated silicon functionality of a 2.5D packaging solution for its high-performance 14nm FinFET FX-14 integrated design system for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs).

The 2.5D ASIC solution includes a stitched interposer capability to overcome lithography limitations and a two terabits per second (2Tbps) multi-lane HBM2 PHY, developed in partnership with Rambus, Inc. Building on the 14nm FinFET demonstration, the solution will be integrated on the company’s next-generation FX-7 ASIC design system built on GF’s 7nm FinFET process technology.

“With the tremendous advances in interconnect and packaging technology that has occurred in recent years, the line between wafer processing and packaging has blurred,” said Kevin O’Buckley, vice president of ASIC product development at GF. “Incorporating 2.5D packaging into ASIC design boosts performance beyond scaling and is a natural evolution of our capabilities. It enables us to support our customers in a one-stop end-to-end fashion, from product design all the way through manufacturing and testing.”

The Rambus memory PHY is aimed at high-end networking and data center applications performing the most data-intensive tasks in systems requiring low-latency and high-bandwidth. The PHY is compliant with the JEDEC JESD235 HBM2 standard, supporting data rates up to 2Gbps per data pin, enabling a total bandwidth of 2Tbps.

“We strive to deliver comprehensive HBM PHY technologies that will enable data center and networking solution providers to meet today’s most demanding workloads and take advantage of compelling market opportunities,” said Luc Seraphin, senior vice president and general manager, Memory and Interfaces Division at Rambus. “Our collaboration with GF combines our HBM2 PHY with their 2.5D packaging and FX-14 ASIC design system and provides a fully-integrated solution for the industry’s fastest-growing applications.”

FX-14 and FX-7 are complete ASIC design solutions that take advantage of GF’s experience in volume production with FinFET process technology. They comprise functional modules based on the industry’s broadest and deepest intellectual property (IP) portfolio, which makes possible unique solutions for next-generation wired/5G wireless networking, cloud/data center servers, machine learning/deep neural networks, automotive, and aerospace/defense applications. GF is one of only two companies in the world that delivers best-in-class IP plus advanced memory and packaging solutions.

IntelliProp, Inc., a developer of Intellectual Property (IP) Cores and semiconductors for Data Storage and Memory applications, announced today the IPA-PM185-CT, Gen-Z Persistent Memory Controller, code named “Cobra.” This controller combines DRAM and NAND and sits on the Gen-Z fabric, not the memory bus. Cobra has the ability to support byte addressability to DRAM cache and Block addressability to NAND flash supporting up to 32GB of DRAM and 6TB of NAND. IntelliProp is a member of the Gen-Z consortium and is working closely with a number of other companies to support the first multi-company Gen-Z demo, being shown this week at Flash Memory Summit.

IntelliProp is exhibiting at Flash Memory Summit, being held at the Santa Clara Convention Center, August 8-10, 2017. IntelliProp is in booth #821. The Gen-Z “Cobra” Controller along with other IP & ASSP demos will be shown at IntelliProp’s booth. The Gen-Z Cobra controller will also be showcased in the Gen-Z Consortium demo in booth #739.

IntelliProp is also showing the NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core, the IPC-NV164-HI. This Core will find primary application with companies doing FPGA and ASIC designs who need high performance connectivity with PCIe based NVMe storage devices. Compliant with the NVMe 1.3 specification, the NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core provides a simple firmware or RTL driven interface for data movement to and from an NVMe endpoint attached to a PCIe link. “We manage the command and completion queues in hardware to accelerate performance by off-loading the processor from needing to handle numerous interrupts,” said Hiren Patel, VP of Business Development at IntelliProp. “The NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core is shipping today for all Xilinx and Altera FPGAs including the latest Ultrascale Plus and Arria 10 FPGAs.  And for those customers that want acceleration with Linux, IntelliProp has also written a Linux driver to work with the NVMe Host Accelerator IP Core,” continued Mr. Patel.

IntelliProp is excited to also announce the availability of additional NVMe products for the storage market.   IntelliProp has released the IPC-NV171A-BR, NVMe-to-NVMe Bridge and the IPP-NV186A-BR, NVMe-to-SATA Bridge. “The NVMe-to-NVMe bridge allows customers to manipulate data or commands from a PCIe root-complex such as a PC to an NVMe drive. The NVMe-to-SATA bridge allows customers to use SATA drives which will enumerate as NVMe drives in the host system,” said Hiren Patel.

Microsemi Corporation, a  provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, today announced its collaboration with Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. (Nasdaq: MLNX), a supplier of high-performance end-to-end smart interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems, and Celestica, a provider of the delivery of end-to-end product lifecycle solutions, to develop a unique reference architecture for NVM express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) applications as part of Microsemi’s Accelerate Ecosystem Program.

Microsemi’s Accelerate Ecosystem speeds development efforts for customers and collaborators through technology alignment, joint marketing and sales acceleration. Collaborating with Microsemi allows companies like Mellanox and Celestica to leverage Microsemi’s peer-to-peer (P2P) memory architecture, which is supported by its Switchtec PCIe switches in combination with its Flashtec NVRAM cards and NVMe controllers to enable large data streams to transfer between NVMe-oF applications without the central processing unit (CPU) in the data plane. This leads to the development of highly optimized NVMe-oF storage subsystems with better throughput, latency and quality of service (QoS). It also enables customers’ data center storage applications such as rack scale architecture, which disaggregates flash and shareable pools of NVMe memory to operate at faster rates.

“With customers designing their next-generation applications around NVMe-oF today, Microsemi has created a strong ecosystem of industry leaders to put together tested and validated solutions for their specific needs,” said Amr Elashmawi, Microsemi’s vice president of corporate and vertical marketing. “The growth potential in this market makes this the perfect time to pair Celestica’s and Mellanox’s expertise with Microsemi’s unique value-add to showcase the NVMe-oF P2P reference architecture accelerating data center and cloud applications.”

The data center market continues to see NVMe storage devices increasingly being moved outside the server to centralized locations in order to share NVMe-based storage across multiple servers and CPUs. This enables better utilization in terms of capacity, rack space and power. According to industry research and marketing firm G2M, Inc., the NVMe market will be more than $57 billion by 2020 and nearly 40 percent of all-flash arrays will be NVMe-based by 2020. The firm also expects NVMe-oF adapter shipments will climb to 740,000 units by 2020.

“Working together with Microsemi through its Accelerate Ecosystem Program allows our team to leverage its performance storage tier, including Switchtec PSX switches, to develop innovative hardware platforms that can be customized for our customers,” said Jason Phillips, senior vice president, Enterprise Solutions at Celestica. “As a result of this important relationship, Celestica successfully launched the first commercially available NVMe dual-port All Flash Array platform, and is preparing to launch our first NVMe-oF solution, powered by Microsemi technology.”

While other companies have seen the benefits of Microsemi’s reference architecture, Microsemi also benefits from these cooperative efforts. With remote direct memory access (RDMA) a key technology in the NVMe-oF ecosystem, working closely with RDMA network interface card (NIC) providers like Mellanox enhances Microsemi’s ability to further serve the needs of its data center, cloud, hyperscale and enterprise original equipment manufacturer (OEM) customers. Such collaborations will enable Microsemi to gain market share for NVMe-oF applications, positioning Microsemi as a key player in the storage revolution.

“Mellanox is excited to collaborate with Microsemi as part of the Accelerate Ecosystem Program, which is delivering solutions with Microsemi’s Switchtec and Flashtec products for NVMe-oF applications,” said Rob Davis, vice president of storage technology at Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox’s market leading ConnectX Network Adapters, including ConnectX-5 and our new BlueField SOC, combined with Microsemi’s P2P CPU memory offload capabilities, offer a comprehensive reference platform for high performance data plane applications and JBOF implementations.”

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ:NXPI) announced a $22 million dollar program that expands its operations in the United States, enabling the Company’s US facilities to manufacture security chips for government applications that can support critical US national and homeland security programs. Upon completion of the expansion project, NXP facilities in Austin and Chandler will be certified to manufacture finished products that exceed the highest domestic and international security and quality standards.

“This initiative advances NXP’s long-term commitment to developing secure ID solutions for federal, state and local government programs in the United States and demonstrates our deep dedication to serving the American market,” said Ruediger Stroh, Executive Vice President of Security and Connectivity at NXP. “The expansion program further positions NXP to deliver solutions for the IoT, connected devices and many other fast-growing applications in the United States as we continue to be a major contributor to the country’s global leadership in the semiconductor industry.”

As the market leader in secure identification solutions, NXP’s proven technology is included in core components that power secure government-issued ID documents in more than 120 countries, and is used by 95 countries worldwide to secure electronic passport programs.

Steve Adler, the Mayor of Austin, said, “We are excited to see NXP investing in Austin and in the cyber security of our country. We trust this initiative will also secure thousands of jobs and further foster the growth of Austin as a major technology hub.”

NXP R&D manufacturing facilities in San Jose, Austin and Chandler have also undergone a thorough security cite certification process to produce Common Criteria EAL6+ SmartMX microcontroller family products. Common Criteria is an international set of guidelines and specifications developed for evaluating information security products to ensure they meet a rigorous security standard for government deployments.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research, today announced worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $97.9 billion during the second quarter of 2017, an increase of 5.8 percent over the previous quarter and 23.7 percent more than the second quarter of 2016. Global sales for the month of June 2017 reached $32.6 billion, an uptick of 2.0 percent over last month’s total of $32.0 billion, and a surge of 23.7 percent compared to the June 2016 total of $26.4 billion. Cumulatively, year-to-date sales during the first half of 2017 were 20.8 percent higher than they were at the same point in 2016. All monthly sales numbers are compiled by the World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) organization and represent a three-month moving average.

“The global semiconductor industry has enjoyed impressive sales growth midway through 2017, posting its highest-ever quarterly sales in Q2 and record monthly sales in June,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association. “Sales into the Americas market were particularly robust in June, and all regional markets saw growth of at least 18 percent year-over-year. Conditions are favorable for continued market growth in the months ahead.”

Regionally, sales increased compared to June 2016 in the Americas (33.4 percent), China (25.5 percent), Asia Pacific/All Other (19.5 percent), Europe (18.3 percent), and Japan (18.0 percent). Sales also were up across all regions compared to last month: the Americas (5.1 percent), Europe (1.9 percent), China (1.5 percent), Japan (1.0 percent), and Asia Pacific/All Other (0.8 percent).

June 2017

Billions

Month-to-Month Sales                              

Market

Last Month

Current Month

% Change

Americas

6.27

6.59

5.1%

Europe

3.11

3.16

1.9%

Japan

2.95

2.98

1.0%

China

10.25

10.41

1.5%

Asia Pacific/All Other

9.43

9.50

0.8%

Total

32.00

32.64

2.0%

Year-to-Year Sales                         

Market

Last Year

Current Month

% Change

Americas

4.94

6.59

33.4%

Europe

2.68

3.16

18.3%

Japan

2.52

2.98

18.0%

China

8.29

10.41

25.5%

Asia Pacific/All Other

7.95

9.50

19.5%

Total

26.38

32.64

23.7%

Three-Month-Moving Average Sales

Market

Jan/Feb/Mar

Apr/May/Jun

% Change

Americas

5.96

6.59

10.5%

Europe

2.96

3.16

7.1%

Japan

2.84

2.98

4.8%

China

10.06

10.41

3.4%

Asia Pacific/All Other

9.02

9.50

5.4%

Total

30.84

32.64

5.8%

GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Silicon Mobility today announced they have successfully produced the industry’s first automotive Field Programmable Controller Unit (FPCU) solution, called OLEA T222. The FPCU solution uses GF’s 55nm Low Power Extended (55LPx) automotive qualified technology platform, which includes Silicon Storage Technology’s (SST) SuperFlash memory technology, to integrate multiple functions onto a single chip, boosting performance for hybrid and electric vehicles.

Silicon Mobility’s OLEA T222 allows automotive processing to be fully deterministic through embedding a Flexible Logic Unit (FLU), with up-to 40 times acceleration, into the control processor architecture to accelerate the processing and control of real-time events. With FLU acceleration, OLEA T222 increases the quality of energy conversion controls to increase safety and achieve ASIL-D for ultra-fast safety applications. Moreover, automotive manufacturers can enhance energy efficiency of DC/DC and AC/DC controls as well as increase battery range, durability, and charging speed for electric motors.

“Efficiency of electric motors, power converters, and battery chargers are key factors for hybrid and electric vehicle control systems,” said Vincent Cruvellier, vice president of operation at Silicon Mobility.“GF’s 55LPx platform, with its fast, low-power logic and Automotive Grade 1 qualification, combined with SST’s highly-reliable SuperFlash memory technology, allowed us to integrate multiple functions into a single chip, creating the OLEA T222 product. Our collaboration with GF, a global foundry committed to the automotive market, helps ensure our customers have the highest quality, reliability and support for the manufacturing of our automotive products.”

GF’s 55nm LPx RF-enabled, automotive-qualified platform provides a fast path-to-product solution that includes silicon qualified RF IP, SST’s highly-reliable SuperFlash memory technology that features:

  • Very fast read speed (<10ns)
  • Small bitcell size
  • Superior data retention (> 20 years)
  •  Superior endurance (> 200K cycles)
  • Fully qualification for Auto Grade 1 operation (AEC-Q100)

“Our platform combined with Silicon Mobility’s design has delivered a highly integrated automotive solution at 55nm, achieving the first FPCU in the industry,” said David Eggleston, vice president of embedded memory at GF. “This is yet another example that GF’s 55LPx platform is becoming the preferred choice for a broad spectrum of markets, including automotive applications that require superior reliability in extreme environments.”

GF’s 55LPx eFlash platform is in volume production at the foundry’s 300mm line in Singapore. The 55LPx eFlash platform is a cost effective solution for a broad range of products, ranging from wearable devices to automotive MCU’s.

Process design kits are available now. Customers can start optimizing their chip designs to develop differentiated SuperFlash-enabled solutions that require cost effective performance, low power consumption, and superior reliability in extreme environments.

For more information on GF’s mainstream CMOS solutions, contact your GF sales representative or go to www.globalfoundries.com.

The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research, today announced retired Gen. Keith Alexander, former Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Commander of U.S. Cyber Command, will deliver the keynote address at SIA’s 40th Anniversary Award Dinner, taking place on Tuesday, Nov. 14 in San Jose, Calif. Alexander, who currently serves as CEO and President of IronNet Cybersecurity, will offer insight on how America’s national security depends heavily on maintaining global leadership in the technologies that are crucial to the functioning of the U.S. military, including semiconductors. He will also discuss the importance of promoting next-generation technologies in order to tackle America’s future cybersecurity challenges.

“Gen. Keith Alexander knows what it takes to maintain and strengthen U.S. defense and cybersecurity, including the importance of advancing America’s global technology leadership,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association. “Semiconductors enable our military’s critical communications, navigation, weapons, and intelligence systems, as well as emergent applications like high-performance computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, robotics, and others that are central to our national security. A vibrant commercial sector is needed to advance these defense technologies and to ensure robust U.S. cybersecurity. Given Gen. Alexander’s wide-ranging national security knowledge and experience, we look forward to hearing his perspectives on these matters as the keynote presenter at SIA’s 40th Anniversary Award Dinner.”

Alexander is a four-star general with an impressive 40-year military career. His tenure as NSA Director (2005-2014) was longer than any other director. While serving in that role, Alexander was appointed by Congress to be the first Commander to lead the U.S. Cyber Command. He held this role from 2010-2014, establishing and defining how our nation is protected against cyber attacks. Serving as a member of the President’s Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, Alexander developed key recommendations to create a defensible national cyber architecture to protect national security by promoting rapid innovation and close public-private collaboration while preserving privacy and civil liberties.

The SIA Award Dinner also will feature the presentation of the semiconductor industry’s highest honor, the Robert N. Noyce Award, to former Micron CEO Mark Durcan. The Noyce Award is named in honor of semiconductor industry pioneer Robert N. Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.