Travelling On The Silicon Road

While last year was bad for the economy, this recession saw most business sectors quick to react and able to absorb the impact better than they did in the past. The year saw a lot of restructuring, quick alignment of the inventory levels to lower demand and constrained capital spending. Now, based on improving macroeconomic indicators and rising surge in demand trends, industry leaders and analysts concur that the world is emerging from the global recession.

So what will 2010 usher? What will it hold for electronics design engineers and managers, particularly those in the ASEAN and India? What market trends will have the greatest impact on the electronics design business?

My take on this as published in EE Times Asia.

There has been a lot of talk recently over the blogosphere (& elsewhere!) about the changing face of EDA, EDA is doomed, EDA needs to change its biz model in order to survive etc.
What needs to be kept in perspective is the evolving value-proposition & risk sharing perceived by the chip designing company from an EDA vendor’s offering; especially in these times of the escalating costs (and diminishing success rates) of  chip designs in the higher technos.
I see the following path for the EDA vendors

• EDA vendors’ offering to be more service oriented and I do not mean tool based trouble shooting here.  

• Point tools across EDA vendors are losing their differentiation but are essential for basic design flow. I do not see chip vendors getting into developing these.  

• EDA vendors will partner for point tools. These tools will evolve as per market requirements and be available on a pay-per-use model and bolstered by cloud computing.  

• As a service, EDA vendors will closely work with the chip developers to see the project from specs to manufacturing. This is the service part of the tool+ service offering of the EDA vendors. The major chunk of the EDA vendor’s revenue will come from this service part and this will be the deciding criteria for the EDA vendors’ ranking in the chip designing world.  

Recommend a couple of interesting articles

What EDA needs to do to start growing again and Cadence goes two-dimensional

I had mentioned about technology fitting serendipitously in developing countries in an earlier post. Just came across this news item which shows yet another use of a consumer device for an unintended but highly useful application.

Pediatric eye surgeons in India and elsewhere find that the iPhone’s security and features makes it the best platform to be used in tele-opthalmology to cure Retinopathy of Prematurity (RoP). An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push retinal images collected from patients in remote locations to the doctors’ iPhones. They can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones to the doctors in the location nearest to the patient. Laboratory assistants take pictures of the retinas of prematurely born babies and transmit them via broadband to pediatric eye surgeons, who could be hundreds or thousands of miles away.
It is envisioning of applications like these that will help to bridge the digital divide

Read an interesting article in the latest edition (Oct 26) of Fortune magazine. It is “An App store for autos?” written by Michael V. Copeland.

As mentioned by Malcolm Penn of Future Horizons in the IEF 2009, “The ‘A’ word is back on the agenda”,
 

But it is not all smooth sailing for the foundry biz. The semiconductor industry’s capex has hit alarmingly low levels. The normal ratio of capex to sales over the industry’s history is 20%. Last year it was 12% and this year it will be 4%. The industry’s overall capacity is now 14% less than it was in Q3.’08. With the economy and market’s forecasted recovery, foundries will be hard pressed next year to meet the demands.
 

And that is where the “C” word comes in – Collaboration and Consolidation.
 

There has also been a lot of talk on consolidation in the foundry biz – as in other areas of the semiconductor industry. There are some pending mergers - between Hua Hong NEC and Grace Semiconductor; Tower Semiconductor’s 2008 purchase of Jazz Semiconductor, proposed acquisition of HeJian Technologies by UMC and the recent purchase of Chartered by GlobalFoundries.
 

Possible future mergers are: SMIC acquiring Cension Semiconductor Manufacturing International and Wuhan Xinxin Semiconductor Manufacturing - two companies which SMIC is managing. And then there are small foundries like Silterra, Altis and Landshunt which are struggling and open to speculation regarding a merger with another manufacturer.”
In all likelihood, as cited by iSuppli, there may be 3 major pure-play foundries left standing after the consolidation – TSMC, UMC and GlobalFoundries.

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Intel will port unspecified Atom processor cores to TSMC’s technology platform, including processes, IP, libraries and design flows under the terms of an agreement between the two companies announced yesterday.
 

The deal will expand the TAM for Atom. It allows TSMC & Intel to go after newer market segments together - namely the embedded, CE, netbooks and handheld market.

Some interesting highlights on this deal:

• It is indeed a rare event for Intel to allow its processor to be manufactured by another company.
• Intel has no plans to license or transfer its high-k process to TSMC. It is doubtful the TSMC Atom devices will include high-k and metal gates. Hence it’s unlikely that the core from TSMC will have the same performance level as that from Intel.
• With PC shipments failing, Intel needs to aggressively penetrate into other markets.
• Intel goes head-on with leading embedded core provider, ARM. While ARM is trying to move to larger devices (from handsets etc.) for its cores, Intel is moving in the opposite direction (PC to smaller devices)
• We may see two strong foundry-IP camps emerging: ARM-IBM alliance and Intel-TSMC for the much sought after mid size converging devices in the embedded space.
• Point to be noted is that while there are 2 different market segments for the processor – higher end processors for PCs and the lower (& cheaper ones) for MIDs, Intel will need to do a real balancing act here so as not to have its profits from the upper segment being eaten away substantially by the lesser profits of the lower end processors.
  

The solar industry challenged semiconductor equipment manufacturers during the Photon Technology show in Munich in April this year, to better address their needs. While in the past, they had to make do with equipment originally developed for the semicon industry, they are pushing the equipment suppliers to build specifically for them.

Looks like, not only the equipment and yield management solutions/services vendors (like KLA-Tencor, Applied Materials etc.), but also the EDA vendors are jumping on this bandwagon; in the process also attempting to improve their bottom line by leveraging from this rapidly growing industry; especially important in times when the forecasts for the semicon industry do not appear too rosy.

With limited resources and the present state of economy, hope this does not come at the cost of inadequately addressed solutions to UDSM design related challenges.

The story is familiar – Foreign companies come into a country to tap into its low cost labour. Sooner or later the low cost factor erodes and those foreign companies move out to newer pastures.

This is what also happened to the semiconductor industry in China. Foreign electronic equipment manufacturers come to tap into its relatively low cost labour. With the global economy going south, they decelerate the pace of their manufacturing outsourcing to China resulting into negative impact of the country. However, this negative impact has partially been off-set by a transformation in the country wherein there is now an increased focus on designing chips for electronic products that are popular in the nation - and thus tapping its own vast domestic market.

Demand for these locally designed chips is being driven mainly by China and Hong Kong-based electronics OEMs and contract manufacturers with foreign ODMs that develop and manufacture goods for Chinese OEMs also chipping in.

The initial manufacturing outsourcing to China had resulted into a large number of local design houses – they are now tapping the domestic market.

The largest application for Chinese designed semiconductors in 2007 was Mobile handsets followed by notebook PCs. But the fastest growing segment for domestically designed semiconductors over the next few years will be mobile communications infrastructure equipment - not surprising as the country is home to two of teh world’s bigger players i.e. Huawei and ZTE who incidentally are aggresively targetting the international markets for their growth.

Am reading an interesting book, “The new age of innovation” by CK Prahalad and MS Krishnan. Prahalad was named “The world’s most influential management thinker” in 2007 by the Times of London. 

The book cites driving co-creativity through global networks as the new global standard for innovation & corporate growth. The 2 basic pillars in this transformation of biz are:   

1. Value based on unique, personalized experiences of consumers, designated as N=1 (one consumer experience at a time). This is not to be confused with vendors offering customized solutions or multiple options. This is working together with the customer in providing him a solution tailored for him. The focus is on the centrality of the individual.   

2. This is R=G pillar where R is the resources from multiple vendors and G is the global resources. As no single firm is, and will be, able to satisfy the experiences of 1 consumer at a time, all firms will access resources from a wider pool – the global ecosystem. 

Interesting examples cited not only drive home the point but it also gives pointers on building up for such a transformation.   

In the land of the technical gizmos’ (especially cellphones) savvy a.k.a –the land of the rising sun, the cellphone firms are targeting the senior citizens. With the maturing of cellphone market for teenagers, companies do need another segment to sell their wares to; and countries with growing senior citizens’ population are an ideal target for the same. 

The combination of real need and marketing savvy could explain the high penetration rate of mobile phones among older Japanese. And success in this market can be replicated in other countries. As I cited in an earlier post (Nov ’06), I’ve found it rather strange why the cellphone vendors had not capitalized on this viable market segment  

Reports that Samsung, the world’s largest buyer of capital equipment, is now putting the brakes on its capital spending, has exacerbated the doom-and-gloom sentiment. Poor memory environment coupled with economic woes have been cited as the main reasons behind semicon equipment vendors’ woes.

A shake-out in the fab tool & electronics materials industries is expected.  While consolidation through acquisitions & mergers loom on the horizon (Applied vying for ASMI, Aquest for Asyst etc.), we also see the semicon fab tool vendors gravitating towards the booming solar industry.  Applied has been diversifying out of chip cap-ex and equipment dominance into a strategy of being a solar player, KLA Tencor also entered the solar market with purchase of ICOS vision systems, a company whose primary business is inspection equipment for semiconductor packaging but which has been successful in the more cost-conscious solar wafer inspection market at key processing steps.

The recent SEMICON West had more than 250 exhibitors that had offerings for both the photovoltaics and the semiconductor markets. But it seemed that nearly every exhibitor had some sort of solar story to tell. From manufacturers of high purity chemicals used for microelectronics selling solar cell surface cleaner to Synopsys providing modeling software for the PV industry, there’s a range of interesting synergies being tapped across the two spaces – recommend you to read Semiconductor International’s write-up on some interesting solar stories from the floor

Gartner Dataquest has cut its semiconductor capital spending forecast by an additional 2.6%, projecting a 22.4% decline for 2008. The company said that the foundry investment pattern could change from, “If we build it, they will come,” to “If they come, we will build it.

Now, that’s something to chew on. With the mantra” If we build it, they will come”, foundries like TSMC moved from pure play foundries towards design support (including not just producing their reference design flows but also developing IPs) and later with the advent of DFM, towards further lowering the gray wall between design & manufacturing by providing access to manufacturing data through unified DFM architecture – all to ensure that their expensive fabs don’t run empty. Whatever the critics may say and apart from treading on the feet of different entities, one of the positive outcomes for the overall industry from this is that this process catalyzed collaboration – forcefully or voluntarily. 

Now moving towards “If they come, we will build it”, we need to see how well that bodes for an industry which is facing growing challenges of shorter time to market as well as shorter product life spans, especially in the consumer area.

A tough balance of bringing capacity more in line with demand – not only for existing but also for the mid term – especially in this period of economic gloom and market down turn.