Some notable items from SEMICON West – San Francisco

At SEMICON West, industry organization SEMI provided some industry insights with two presentations. SEMI has more than 2,000 member companies in the science and business of electronics manufacturing. The first talk was by Denny McGuirk, President and CEO, who noted the two main happenings in the semiconductor industry: massive industry consolidation and realignment ($100 billion in M&A) and increasing demand for IoT and smart manufacturing.

Then Dan Tracy, senior director, industry research and statistics, took the stage. Dan noted that the growth rate for cell phones is nearing saturation. In 2013, it was about 42%, and the forecast for 2016 is 8%. You don’t want to stop looking at phones, however; SEMI expects sales of 1.5 billion cell phones in 2016. PC sales continued to drop, but not a lot. Sales are forecasted to be 483 million PC, tablet, and cloud computing units in 2016 versus 493 million in 2015.

Semiconductor revenue is forecasted to decline by 2.4% in 2016, after a 0.8% decline last year. Ever-hopeful SEMI predicts a 2% rise in 2017. IC unit sales are up 1.2% from last year, but semiconductor production equipment bookings are down 1.4%. Dan said that 19 new fabs will begin construction in 2016 and 2017; 10 of those are in China. 

The SEMICON opening keynote by John Kern, Senior VP of supply chain operations at Cisco, was interesting. From Cisco's start in 1984 at Stanford and its first commercial router in 1986, it has grown to 77,000 employees and close to $50 billion in revenue. John talked about connecting the unconnected, saying that over the next five years, the number of internet users will increase to 4.1 billion, and even more significantly, an additional 10.1 billion devices will be connected to the network. That should keep them busy.

John noted that there has been talk about software-defined networks and the commoditization of networks. Cisco sees that network hardware is essential to the network and essential to the differentiation they offer their customers and that silicon is what makes it all happen. They are using a 16-nm ASIC that is 727 sq mm with 550 M gates and has 256 SerDes I/O with up to 28-Gbit/s speeds. Silicon technology is 60% of Cisco’s GOGS. John also noted that through-silicon-via (TSV) technology will be very important to Cisco.

Meanwhile, Coventor, a supplier of virtual fabrication solutions for semiconductor devices and MEMS, was showing off SEMulator3D 6.0, the latest version of its semiconductor virtual fabrication platform that is used to resolve issues in adopting new 3D lithography methods. The product won the Best of West 2016 award at SEMICON, and Coventor’s CTO, Dr. David Fried, was a guest speaker at the imec Technology Forum (ITF), held in conjunction with SEMICON.

Imec, the Belgian research center, also announced that it has signed a strategic partnership with ARM. ARM’s involvement with imec’s INSITE program will focus on addressing the impacts of circuit design and system-level architecture on power, performance, area, and cost of nanotechnology chip process nodes from 7 nm and beyond.

Altogether, this year’s SEMICON provided the industry with yet another fine opportunity to encourage both collaboration and innovation.