Tag Archives: The ConFab

Three fundamental shifts

At The ConFab last week, Dr. Gary Patton, vice president, semiconductor research and development center at IBM, said there is a bright future in microelectronics (I heartily agree). He said that although there seems to be a fair amount of doom and gloom that scaling is ending and Moore’s Law is over, he is very positive. “There are three huge fundamental shifts that are going to drive our industry forward, will drive revenue growth and will force us to keep innovating to enable new opportunities,” he said.

The first fundamental shift is the explosion of applications in the consumer and mobile space. Patton noted examples such as cars that can drive themselves and can detect people and bicyclists and avoid them, smart phones for as little as $25, wearable devices that not only tell you what you’re doing but how you’re doing, and 4K television. “That is an incredible TV system, but it’s going to demand a lot of bandwidth; twice the bandwidth that’s out there today. If you turn on your 4K system, your neighbors are going to start to notice it when they try to access the internet,” he said.

Patton said that it’s estimated that today there are about 12.5 billion devices connected to the internet. That’s expected to grow to $30 billion by 2020. This represents the second fundamental shift commonly known as Big Data. “All these interconnected devices are shoving tremendous amount of data up into the cloud at the rate of 1.5 Exabytes (1018) bytes of data per month,” Patton said. “And that’s grown by about an order of magnitude in just the last 13 years. The estimate is that in the next 4 years, it’s going to go up another order of magnitude. It’s accelerating.”

The third fundamental shift is with all this data going up into the cloud, the data is almost all unstructured data, such as video and audio. “It’s related data but disconnected. How do we take that data and do something with it? That brings us to analytics and cognitive computing. We have really just started in this arena.”

So there you have it. Three reasons to be very positive about the future of the semiconductor industry: an explosion of applications, the rise of big data and the need to analyze all that data.

GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ Kengeri to speak at The ConFab

Subramani Kengeri, Vice President, Advanced Technology Architecture at GLOBALFOUNDRIES will speak at The ConFab 2014 on the “techno-economics” of how the relatively small semiconductor industry ($350 billion or $0.35 trillion) is driving the $85 trillion gross world product (GWP). He notes that semiconductors are only a fraction of GWP, but a critical enabler of global economic growth and productivity. Cost effective technology innovations have kept Moore’s law alive, although techno-economic challenges are mounting on each successive node. The cost of building a new advanced fab has reached $6B. Process development and chip design costs are going up astronomically, while next generation SoCs in the IoT era are pushing cost-per-function to unprecedented levels, he says. His talk will review advanced design and silicon technology challenges posing threats to cost effective scaling, potentially impacting global GWP and productivity. 

Subramani (“Subi”) is responsible for defining competitive process architecture on advanced nodes in support of “first time right” technology development. He is responsible for determining the technology feasibility, competitiveness and manufacturability of all elements of technology platform and to establish the advanced technology roadmap for GLOBALFOUNDRIES.

Subramani joined GLOBALFOUNDRIES in 2009 as the Vice President of Design Solutions. He implemented strategic Design enablement initiatives and established a strong foundation for collaboration with Design eco-system, before moving to focus on R&D. He started his Semiconductor career at Texas Instruments and prior to joining GLOBALFOUNDRIES, he was the Senior Director of Design and Technology Platform at TSMC.

 

Extreme Stress for Existing Foundry/Fabless Model

Dr. Roawen Chen, senior vice president of global operations at Qualcomm, will provide the keynote talk at The ConFab 2014 this year. The event will be held June 22-25 at The Encore at The Wynn in Las Vegas.

In his talk, Dr. Chen, will describe how the increased performance and the rapid shift from traditional handsets to consumer computing device post a number of manufacturing and supply chain challenges for fabless chip makers. He says the scale of the challenges also creates an “extreme stress” for the existing foundry/fabless model to defend its excellence in this dynamic landscape. In this talk of “what’s on our mind?” he will deliberate on a number of headwinds and opportunities.

In his role at Qualcomm, Roawen oversees the worldwide operations and supply chain, silicon and package technology, quality/reliability, and procurement functions for the Qualcomm semiconductor business. He has overall responsibility for driving the global integrated fabless strategy and execution.

Roawen is an experienced leader in all aspects of semiconductor operations and supply chain management with a solid background in leading large-scale fabless operations. In addition to his strong technical depth, he has proven experience in building close supplier and vendor relationships and executing to support customer demand and product development. Prior to Qualcomm, Roawen was Vice President of Manufacturing Operations at Marvell Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California. During his more than 12 years at Marvell, Roawen held a variety of leadership roles, including Vice President and General Manager of the Communications and Computing business unit and Vice President and General Manager of the Connectivity business unit. He has also served in management roles in Marvell’s Foundry Operations and Manufacturing Technology groups.

Prior to Marvell, Roawen held technical positions at TSMC-USA and Intel. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Physics from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan, a master’s degree in Materials Science from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

At The ConFab 2014: The Outlook for the Semiconductor Industry

The semiconductor market will continue at a steady growth rate for the next several years. For a semiconductor company to achieve significant growth in this ultra-competitive environment, it needs to identify market opportunities and predict the future, in terms of markets, both regionally and globally, anticipate technological advancements, as well as envision new applications. At The ConFab in June, Session 1 will provide an overview of these critical issues.

The presenters will be:

Vijay Ullal, COO, Fairchild Semiconductor

Dave Anderson, President and CEO, Novati Technologies

Gopal Rao, Senior Director Business Development, SEMATECH

Adrian Maynes, Program Manager, F450C

Bill McClean, President, IC Insights

Here’s an overview of what each presenter plans to cover:

The Economics of Semiconductor Manufacturing and the Escalating Cost of R&D

Vijay Ullal, COO, Fairchild Semiconductor

While innovation in semiconductor technology is driving change in industries from automotive to mobile, and the sophistication of computers, mobile devices, automobiles, industrial systems and consumer goods evolves, greater pressure is placed on semiconductor research and development (R&D) as well as Supply Chain Management (SCM). Now, the bar has been raised from not only delivering leading-edge technology, but also to delivering far greater value to an organization. This presentation will use examples of to focus R&D as well as revitalize your supply chain in order to highlight your competitive advantages, and better meet these market place demands by moving beyond the “product sell” to an approach that focuses instead on the key attributes customer’s value.

More-than-Moore: A New Era of Innovation

Dave Anderson, CEO, Novati Technologies

The semiconductor industry has focused on Moore’s Law for more than 40 years in its quest for ever shrinking geometries to squeeze more transistors on a chip and improve device speed and performance.  Digital microcircuits have benefited immensely from this extreme scaling but, with fewer companies having the ability to support further scaling, More-than-Moore (MtM) has emerged to apply decades of semiconductor process knowledge to novel applications to produce state-of-the-art biochips, sensors, actuators, imagers and more. Perhaps most importantly, MtM technology is enabling companies to build these components more cost-effectively and with better performance and smaller size than ever before.

Providing a significant advantage over traditional volume foundries, a new wave of boutique nanotechnology development centers is in a unique position to integrate new materials with custom processes. This provides a rapid acceleration of development and production for world-leading ideas and breakthrough MtM products.

The result is a new era of innovation that couples the best of the past with future demands to create valuable applications and markets. The era for enabling the most rapid, but affordable, new product development and deployment has begun.

Enabling the Supply Chain to Accelerate R&D

Gopal Rao, Senior Director of Business Development, SEMATECH

There is a push/pull market energy that is now, more than ever, influencing the device makers, suppliers and the consumers who are thirsty for innovative mobile computing and connected devices. The IC industry has relied on a push based roadmaps to bring products to market. It is important that we acknowledge that the consumer appetite for innovative and cool products has created a pull system that may be considered a roadmap. The challenge facing the whole IC industry is how to recognize, rationalize and leverage these push/pull roadmaps. This talk examines this IC industry challenge and opportunity, specifically in moving the vast supply chain to feed into this fast moving market. The pace of R&D through entire supply chain is essential in staying ahead of the curve and driving down cost of technology and manufacturing. Radical, innovative product designs to meet consumer demand will push into the IC supply chain the need to identify and develop significant cost/performance improvements in IC device performance. What are these improvements? Are the current roadmaps highlighting them or do we need to better, integrated intelligent roadmap that helps the supply chain stay on treadmill of innovation and cost reduction?

450mm Transition towards Sustainability: Facility & Infrastructure Requirements

Adrian Maynes, F450C Program Manager

It is widely accepted that in the next few years the semiconductor industry will begin to transition to the next generation 450mm wafer size. Experts throughout the semiconductor industry are striving to make 450mm a reality from a technical and manufacturing standpoint. Along with the increase in wafer size, the industry is closely examining impacts to the facility infrastructure, as merely scaling the manufacturing process is not a practical option. The size of the 450mm facility infrastructure and its associated utility consumption projections would simply exceed affordability and resource availability.

The facility experts involved in establishing and later implementing 450mm infrastructure requirements are facing the same degree of challenges as the IC and equipment manufacturers. For the first time in semiconductor history, facility professionals are collaborating closely with the industry’s top five consolidated IC manufacturers to bring their collective expertise to bear on the most pressing 450mm fab issues. With special focus on safety, cost, schedule, sustainability, and environmental footprint, this global consortium of industry specialists is aiming to reduce the cost of production, increase productivity for manufacturers, and reduce the environmental footprint on a per chip basis

This presentation will address these various infrastructure requirements and potential issues for a more sustainable manufacturing process. The session will be co-presented by leaders of the Facilities 450mm Consortium (F450C) and the Global 450mm Consortium (G450C). These two groups are collaborating as experts from across the entire supply chain to ensure a smooth transition to the 450mm technology.

Major Trends Impacting the IC Industry of the Future

Bill McClean, Presdient, IC Insights

IC Insights forecasts that 2014 will continue the integrated circuit industry cyclical upturn that began in 2013.  This cyclical upturn is expected to gain momentum over the next several years, resulting in a 6.4% IC market CAGR over the 2013-2018 time period, which would be more than 3x the 1.7% CAGR the IC market displayed from 2007-2012. Although a high level of uncertainty still looms over the global economy, sales of smartphones and tablet PCs continue to soar.  IC Insights will present its forecast for the IC market in the context of the IC industry cycle model.  In order to make sense out of the current turmoil, a top-down analysis of the IC market will be given and include trends in worldwide GDP growth, electronic system sales, and semiconductor industry capital spending and capacity.

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The ConFab R&D Panel is Set

A panel session at The ConFab, to be held June 22-25 in Las Vegas, will focus on how the semiconductor industry can continue to innovate in an environment where lower revenue growth is combined with rising development costs and consolidation.  The panel will discuss where the next big growth drivers will come from and the ability of the industry to continue scaling and remain on Moore’s Law through the introduction of new technologies such as EUV, Advanced Packaging and 450mm.  How will the costs to develop these and other technologies affect innovation and what levers can be utilized to gain more efficiencies in R&D.  The panel will also discuss what role startups will play in the industries going forward and how can increased collaboration benefit the industry. 

The panel, to be moderated by Scott Jones of Alix Partners, will consist of:

Rory McInerny, Vice President Platform Engineering Group, Intel

Chris Danely, Senior Analyst, JP Morgan

Mike Noonen, Co-founder, Silicon Catalyst

Lode Lauwers, Senior Director of Business Development, imec

Some of the subjects that will be covered:

Where does do the next growth drivers come from?

When will wearables, medical devices and the internet of things really drive revenue growth?

What challenges do we have on the R&D side in servicing the growth areas more quickly?

How are the costs of scaling and the development costs of SOCs affecting growth?

What advances from the chip design and architecture side are compensating for the challenges in scaling?

What view does the institutional investing community have on investing in innovation versus acquiring it?

What is the state of the Start-up environment in Semiconductors?

How do we leverage collaboration more to improve on our return on R&D investment?

Click here for more information on The ConFab 2014 agenda.

Qualcomm’s Dr. Roawen Chen to keynote at The ConFab

I’m delighted to report that Dr. Roawen Chen, Senior Vice Present of global operations at Qualcomm, has accepted our invitation to deliver the keynote talk at The ConFab, on Monday June 23rd. As previously announced, Dr. Gary Patton, Vice President of IBM’s Semiconductor Research and Development Center in East Fishkill, New York, will deliver the keynote on the second day, on Tuesday June 24th. I’m thrilled to have these two visionaries speak to The ConFab audience.

In his role at Qualcomm, Roawen oversees the worldwide operations and supply chain, silicon and package technology, quality/reliability, and procurement functions for the Qualcomm semiconductor business. He has overall responsibility for driving the global integrated fabless strategy and execution.

Roawen is an experienced leader in all aspects of semiconductor operations and supply chain management with a solid background in leading large-scale fabless operations. In addition to his strong technical depth, he has proven experience in building close supplier and vendor relationships and executing to support customer demand and product development. Prior to Qualcomm, Roawen was Vice President of Manufacturing Operations at Marvell Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California. During his more than 12 years at Marvell, Roawen held a variety of leadership roles, including Vice President and General Manager of the Communications and Computing business unit and Vice President and General Manager of the Connectivity business unit. He has also served in management roles in Marvell’s Foundry Operations and Manufacturing Technology groups.

Prior to Marvell, Roawen held technical positions at TSMC-USA and Intel. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Physics from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan, a master’s degree in Materials Science from the University of California, San Diego and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.

The ConFab will be held June 22-25 at The Encore at The Wynn in Las Vegas.