VLSID 2010 enlightens chip designers on <32nm challenges and the emerging markets

23rd VLSI Design conference 2010 held on Jan 5th to Jan 7th in the Silicon city of Bangalore was attended by some the best semiconductor and VLSI gurus from all over the world and India.

This year's event was blended with more market and product requirement information along with hardcore VLSI stuff. As usual some of the presentations were quite deep in technology.

Engineers rate this event high compared to similar events held in Bangalore. When this writer queried about the quality and the relevance of event with some of the attendees, the feedback was 'this is the best event in this domain'. The only complaint was too much learning in a very short time. Anyway that's the industry trend.

TI India's President and MD Dr. Biswadip Mitra inaugurated the event. He suggested semiconductor engineers to go more system development way and he stressed the importance of end market application in product design.

He also highlighted the growing importance of emerging markets such as India. India's Semiconductor market is growing faster than the world's semiconductor market. He said, "It's a fantastic ground for applications such as industrial consumer and automotive".

Prof. Dimitri Antoniadis, Director, Focus Research Center of Materials Structures and Devices of MIT presented material and process challenges to make nano electronics devices beyond 32nm technology nodes. Key highlights of his talk include:
Chip design bugs to outgrow to monster size at the node of 22nm and below. The inherent advantage the semiconductor technology gained in all these years will no more continue at same level. Silicon continue to be used in next generation chips up to 11nm. While industry transits to next nodes, Silicon is going to be accompanied with other new material such as Ge and III-V's and also higher mobility materials such as carbon nanotubes, and graphene. Beyond 11nm there is a scope for a totally new process and material other than Silicon.

Dr. Hermann Eul, Member of Management Board of Infineon shared industry view of technology challenges in semiconductor domain.
The key technology and market trends he shared include:
Semiconductor chip making is more of software and less of hardware in the coming years. The software part is 70% of the total skills.
The demand for low cost electronic devices/systems as well as high end gadgets is increasing. He quoted the example of growing use of smart phones and <20$ mobile phone handsets.
While service providers are entering into OEM product domain, the OEMs are entering into service domain. This alerts semiconductor IDMs to expand into other domain in the semiconductor value chain.
Industry is researching highly challenging technologies such as integrating high value capacitors and inductors inside the chips.