May 2011

At the recent Semico Summit STMicroelectronics presented its view on shaping the semiconductor future.  Bob Krysiak, Executive VP and GM of the Americas Region, spoke on how ST and the semiconductor industry is “doing well by doing good.”

Mr. Krysiak pointed out the demographic changes that are occurring.  There is increasing world population with most of this growth in non-Western countries.  By 2050 there will be nearly 10 billion people, an increase of 3 billion over today.  In addition we have an aging population.  This puts pressure on many resources.

The theme of his presentation, “doing well by doing good,” presents the internet and connectivity as key elements in addressing these issues.  He noted that the internet and connectivity have become the plumbing of our world and industry.  There are a growing number of online users, many in China.

We will depend more on the internet and connectivity for increases in productivity and security.  Human productivity will depend more on mobility and wireless.  Banking will be transformed by this, but then security becomes more important.  This will lead to growth in brand authentication, protection and trusted platform security.

Paolo Gargini—Intel Fellow, Technology and Manufacturing Group and Director of Technology Strategy for Intel—spoke on May 3 at the Semico Summit 2011.  He highlighted the time gap between when an idea is formed, to when the science, technology and engineering are able to make that idea a reality.  The incubation time for an idea to become real has shortened from several hundred years for satellites, to 12-15 years now for many ideas.

In a May 2, 2011 presentation at the Semico Summit, Mr. Danny Biran, Senior VP of Marketing at Altera, discussed new opportunities as the boundaries between semiconductor logic device types become blurred. According to Mr. Biran, the boundary between FPGAs, ASICS, ASSPS and CPUs (MPUs, MCUs and DSPs has until recently been extremely well defined. 

FPGAs were customer programmable standard products.  Programming was developed for and owned by the customer.  ASICs used a standard cell design methodology.  The design was owned by the customer.  ASSPs were a standard high-volume product developed by the semiconductor vendor for sale to multiple customers.  MPUs, MCUs and DSPs were standard products, but the software needed to implement an application was developed by the customer.  Now, the boundaries between those categories are becoming blurred. Various semiconductor vendors are offering FPGAs with an on-board MPU, ASICs that include an FPGA block or ASSPs with multiple processing cores.  

At the just concluded Semico Summit 2011 conference, Sandeep Vij, President and CEO of MIPS Technologies made some very interesting observations regarding Consumer electronics applications and their use of memory resources. We all know that the feature sets and functionality of devices aimed at Consumer applications have been increasing over the last 3-4 years.

This is driven by the requirements of users of these devices for OEMs to deliver ever-increasing amounts of functionality like HD quality video, video downloads, touch screens, multiple HD cameras, personal video conferencing and multiple types of integrated sensors. Future requirements will include, but are not limited to, medical sensors, 100’s if not 1000’s of apps run in the devices, 3D-HD video, etc. These new levels of functionality must be fulfilled by placing higher levels of complexity into these silicon solutions to provide the right feature sets consumers desire.

All this takes an increasing amount of resources to deliver the right user experience. MIPS is the second largest CPU IP vendor next to ARM and is one of the first companies to see what these new levels of functionality demand in terms of the compute and system resources that must be placed into the system.