Semiconductor industry bullish on emerging markets
By siliconindia   |   Thursday, 07 January 2010, 00:32 IST
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Bangalore: After facing tough times due to the economic slowdown, the semiconductor industry is set to grow in the coming months mainly fueled by the high demand in emerging markets. "Emerging markets like India is a huge opportunity for the semiconductor industry," said Biswadip Mitra, President and Managing Director of Texas Instruments. Mitra was speaking during the inauguration of the 23rd International Conference on VLSI Design. Incidentally, the year 2010 also marks 25 years since Texas Instruments became the first multinational to set up a base in Bangalore in 1985. Keeping in mind the huge opportunities in the emerging markets, the theme for this year's conference is 'Affordable technology for emerging markets.' India is not only a major consumer of semiconductor products but it has gradually set its mark in the product development side too. Emphsizing on the point, Mitra says, "India is well known around the globe for semiconductor design and several international and domestic companies are innovating here." During the five-day conference, several industry gurus shared their knowledge to representatives from the chip design, electronic design automation (EDA) and embedded system communities. Today, CMOS technologies are unique examples of nanoscale engineering at an industrial scale, however, there are some challenges that nanoelectonics could face in the coming years. Prof. Dimitri Antoniadis of Massachusetts Institute of Technology discussed these challenges and the possible scenario for the introduction of novel nano-electronic devices. Today, mobile Internet is emerging as one of the key future revenue engines. It will be mainly driven by users in emerging countries like India, where people use their mobile phones to access internet. This trend comes along with continuous cost pressure and ongoing feature integration calling for deep submicron CMOS technology. Dr. Hermann Eul, Member of Management Board of Infineon elaborated on the trends and the challenges that the deep micron CMOS technology could face in the future. The audience was also provided an overview of DLP technology by Dr. Larry J. Hornbeck, Fellow, Texas Instruments. Today, DLP technology enables the tiniest products embedded in mobile phones and the brightest products of over 30,000 lumens. Several times, escalating complexity has threatened to derail the IC industry from the 35 percent annual reduction in transistor pricing it has enjoyed in the past 40 years. As a result, the EDA industry has repeatedly delivered improvements in many aspects of the IC design cycle. Dr. Walden C. Rhines, CEO of Mentor Graphics, discussed on why 10X improvements in design methodologies are needed in the next five years in areas such as high-level system design, verification, embedded software development and back-end physical design and test. Apart from these interesting talks, around 70 technical papers, which were selected after a vigorous review, will also be presented during the conference that is organized annually by VLSI Society of India.

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