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Reporter's Notebook: The IC industry has matured, so what?
I was pretty annoyed over lunch yesterday, and it wasn't because I'd just broken a front tooth on an olive pit. I had just come from the closing panel of the International Electronics Forum here in Dubai, where, after dismissively answering the hosts' questions on whither the future of the emirate's silicon ambitions and the nature of industry innovation in general, the discussion quickly turned to the IC industry's current state of malaise and consolidation.
From there it quickly devolved into navel gazing, finger pointing and — dare I say it — whining. It was like a mirage gone bad.
So, here I am, after an hour and a half embedded with the best and brightest of what the electronics industry has to offer, and all I have is a half page of notes, and those are from answers to the opening question from the hosts on what Dubai Silicon Oasis Authority (DSOA) has to do to be successful in transforming the region into a world-class electronics hub. More on that later. What struck me at the panel was that we had hosts who were optimistically focused on the future and all they were getting was griping and hindsight.
To be sure, the problems facing the industry are many: single-digit growth, the commoditization of advanced CMOS processes, lack of differentiation, all leading to rounds of consolidation that will only accelerate.
Right before the panel, I was speaking Theo Claasen, executive vice president of NXP, and he said that the 450 semiconductor companies currently in existence should be whittled down to 50. "That's more than enough," he said. I was more than a bit taken aback by that, to be honest. Read more on his thoughts on this as well as the logic behind a fab-lite model and how he believes NXP can maintain differentiation with seemingly shared foundry processes in my related news-y piece (see: NXP's Claasen: 50 IC companies are still too many).
While I was surprised by Claasen's comments, I was totally gobsmacked during the panel session when Ray Bingham (yes, the Ray Bingham, ex-exec manager at Cadence and now managing director at equity firm General Atlantic ) said the IC industry should follow the EDA model with a few big companies waiting around to snatch up a host of innovating smaller companies. "A cost effective way of doing R&D," he said. So, the EDA industry had the right model all along. How did that happen?
Given his background, I should be looking squintily at Bingham's comments. But biased or not, he was echoing something Claasen had just said to me outside. One of the reasons NXP had recently bought Conexant's set-top box division was to combine resources. By mashing Conexant's $200 million in STB sales with NXP's $300 million, "we can now do the R&D required [for the market]."
But I digress. My issue here is with the panel itself: How can the leaders, observers and analysts of the smartest and most innovative minds in the world — yes, that's you, the Creators of Technology — travel God knows how many thousands of miles to gripe? It's the economy, it was the equity buyouts, it's too hard to do 22 nm and 450-mm wafers, and on it went.
The IC industry has matured, so what? It had to happen sometime. ICs were never what we were all about. We were — and are — all about innovating and engineering. Creating and evolving. ICs are a big result of that, to be sure, but they're just a side-effect. Spurious noise from designers' imaginations. A fellow editor/journalist, north-Virginia-based Paul Dempsey, put it well when he piped up and said the money guys saw the industry as just being about ICs, blocks that go 'plunk' when you drop them. It isn't about that, he said. It's about the software that goes on top and the total system design.
Dempsey was right on, and vocalized it well, but I think that's the soft outer skin of the olive. The 'pit' that's breaking the industry's teeth is a lack of vision and an inability to see beyond itself. The next step in technology's evolution is the merging of multiple disciplines. We know how to make ICs and build the software on top of them (though the latter needs a lot of work still). What about merging the various disciplines of electronics, biology and chemistry and building organic circuits for medicine and more advanced computational capabilities? That's one line of evolution. During his presentation on developments in optoelectronics, Waguih Ishak, vice president and director of west coast research at Corning Inc. concluded by pointing to a Venn diagram with an overlap in photonics, electronics and genetic research as being the most exciting wave of next-generation innovation.
Either way, the point's the same: Designers and engineers are chewing olive pits by focusing on ICs alone as the catapult to the next step in our industry's evolution. They're breaking teeth and not understanding why. I can go to the dentist next week and be fixed up in no time. Not so for our designers. It's time to step back, reexamine the buffet and select a better, more cross-discipline, combinatorial diet to achieve the next level of technological innovation. And then grow the new teeth needed to chew it. Maybe this time in the desert is a necessary, cathartic step in that growth process. I hope so.
I'm open to being chewed out myself, so feel free to do so at pmannion@techinsights.com. All comments welcome.
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