EIGHT KEY FORCES:
Aart de Geus
Chairman and CEO, Synopsys, www.synopsys.com
Tom Engibous
Chairman and CEO, Texas Instruments Inc., www.ti.com
Jerry Fiddler
Chairman and co-founder, Wind River Systems Inc., www.windriver.com
Jack Gifford
CEO and president, Maxim Integrated Products Inc., www.maxim.com
Alex Lidow
CEO, International Rectifier, www.irf.com
T.J. Rodgers
Chairman and CEO, Cypress Semiconductor, www.cypress.com
Ray Stata
Founder and chairman, Analog Devices Inc., www.analog.com
Robert H. Swanson Jr.
Chairman and CEO, Linear Technology Corp., www.linear-tech.com
Although the state of the electronics industry is less than stellar right now, key figures in the business maintain a positive outlook—for today and tomorrow—on both their companies and the entire industry. Although business is tough, stocks are down, budgets are tight, consumer confidence is thin, and market forecasts are sketchy at best, none of this seems to faze these leaders. The big picture, as they see it, is huge, especially for the long-term.
"Despite today's market conditions, we see a very bright future for electronics, in general, and signal processing technology, in particular," says Ray Stata of Analog Devices. "The world is leveraging electronics in everything we do."
Tom Engibous of Texas Instruments Inc. couldn't agree more. "By 2015 at least, I think the electronics marketplace will reach $2 trillion worldwide. That's a trillion dollars of growth waiting to happen in a relatively short time," he says.
This kind of optimism also pervades the EDA sector. "In the next 10 years," notes Aart de Geus of Synopsys, "the pace will not slow down."
Jack Gifford of Maxim Integrated Products be-lieves that the immediate availability of data has made everyone more productive and efficient, which has been good for the economy. Wireless technologies and the Internet will continue to be important, claims Gifford, but "until a model is found to effectively sell bandwidth, both Internet and wireless growth will be somewhat constrained," he says.
"For me," says Jerry Fiddler of Wind River Systems, "the core problem is usage. What do people want to do, what do they want to carry, and how do they want to use it? No one knows what we're going to be using, or how we're going to interface with it. The biggest change over the next few years is that we're going to be in a world of hundreds of billions of connected devices that allow us to access and capture in-formation. And it's not going to be just computers. It's going to be much more pervasive than that. It's going to be embedded, pervasive intelligence, with information and communications."
Engibous thinks that growth over the next decade will be driven by the increasing demand for many mobile communications form factors, suggesting a "fundamental shift in the marketplace," he says. "Signal processing will become more important than microprocessing. Rapidly, signal processing is becoming the engine for every phone call, wireless multimedia connection, personal mobile device, and photograph that people take." With that in mind, Engibous says that Texas Instruments is now ramping new 300-mm, 130-nm copper production lines to bolster its position in DSPs. The company's engineers expect to continue to introduce hundreds of new analog chips each year.
What Linear Technology's Robert H. Swanson Jr. calls the "new respect for the analog IC opportunity" will be "reinforced as we go forward" with the convergence of computing, communications, and the proliferation of portable products. From a nontechnical perspective, Swanson says that the industry must grapple with the fact that it's taking suppliers and customers more time and energy to negotiate terms and conditions as the first hurdle to doing business. Often this takes priority over technology, quality, and service.
Cypress Semiconductor has set a goal for itself that calls for posting its first $1 billion quarter in 2005. To accomplish that, T.J. Rodgers maintains that his company will need to grow beyond the capabilities of its core communications businesses. The firm seeks to close the revenue gap through investment-type transactions with independent corporations that Cypress has an option to acquire but is not obligated to manage on a daily basis. One of its "gap" initiatives is Cypress Microsystems (CMS), a company that it formed recently to attack the $7 billion, 8-bit microcontroller market. CMS produces programmable system-on-a-chip devices that replace custom microcontrollers in a range of applications. Cypress has a contractual right to buy CMS when it achieves certain revenue and profitability targets. Cypress also recently formed Silicon Magnetic Systems (SMS) to develop low-cost, low-power, nonvolatile magnetic memory and has the same option to acquire SMS as with CMS.
Stata sees a transformation under way from "producing" companies to "thinking" companies. "I expect this to continue, especially for small and medium-size companies," he says. "Among semiconductor firms, the change is evident in the pervasive use of IC foundries, for example." Stata says that the lifecycle of the produced product continues to shrink, as does the lifecycle of the technologies inside. He believes that sustaining the pace of evolution will require a focus on innovation. Creating an environment where innovators can flourish and produce will become even more important in the future.
Clearly from a technology point of view, industry leaders believe that there's still much to do. "Thermal limits are threatening to slow down the pace of progress in computing technology and even rewrite Moore's Law," notes Alex Lidow of International Rectifier. "Lowering operating voltages for our digital computer and communications chips creates fundamental changes in the delivery system used to supply this energy." In the past, Lidow says that the delivery of power to the digital chip was an afterthought. Now, he says the need for extremely high currents at very low voltages (130 A at 1 V going to 200 A at 0.6 V in the next five years) is driving concurrent development of superior power-management MOSFETs, packaging, control ICs, and architecture. "All of these disciplines must improve by an order of magnitude if we are to prevent power management from being the roadblock to higher performance," Lidow says.
Noting that history often repeats itself with the call for smaller devices and more devices, de Geus signals his own warnings. Now, he claims that the smaller devices (0.13 or 0.09 micron) are bringing a slew of physical phenomena that previously could be neglected. Labeled under the general category of "signal-integrity issues," they require a specific approach: up-front avoidance in the design flow. "Failing to leverage this approach," observes de Geus, "will result in an overwhelming number of chips that will never reach the market."
Reprints
)
