Semiconductor market 2014: cool wind is blowing

By Srinivas Just like finFET's capacitance analysis, today's global semiconductor market is dependent on multiple complex parameters. Even the variance (minute change in behavior of some things) factor affects finFET as well as semiconductor market in a similar way. finFET based semiconductor chip fabrication is risky attempt to improve performance of semiconductor chips beyond 20 nm. It is known fact that finFETs doesn't offer same level of economics of scale compared to previous nodes. It is more or less clear that the famous Moore's Law based economics of scale is less and less relevant down the 20 nm node. A strong guess by me is that 16 nm TSMC process and 14 nm process by Intel is ready for production in 2013 itself, but these companies may not be pushing these technologies that aggressively in terms of early production. They may be going little slow until they see some stronger manufacturing hope on EUV and 7 nm/10 nm process nodes. There is also intensive research going on for 450mm as well as 3-D IC fabrication, which are more viable for serving the larger and important market such as Asia. Irrespective of all these complex market and technology strategies affecting the semiconductor market, one big clearly visible trend is fast growing use of smart devices across applications and across the classes and section of people world over. This cool wind is...