What’s changed, though, is the resistance by other companies to the progression of Moore’s Law. There is no longer a sense of resignation that they won’t be partaking in the benefits of advanced nodes. In a 3D stacked die world, it doesn’t matter if the digital portion of the chip—particularly the memory and some of the logic and IP—are developed at 15nm or even 6nm. As long as the analog and some of the IP don’t have to follow the same process node progression, then it no longer matters. The rest is an integration exercise, and much of chip development these days is integration, anyway.

This is a fundamental shift for the industry as a whole, and it will require some significant planning at the system level. While it’s still possible to account for hot spots and signal integrity in a two-die structure, it becomes harder with each new layer. Place-and-route models have to include thermal dynamics, and they have to be built for multiple generations in the future so logic doesn’t sit on top of logic and cook the chip into oblivion. This can all done with some foresight and standardized approaches, of course. It’s what engineers are good at.

It also means more standardized interconnect models, most likely a network on chip type of approach, and better understanding of through-silicon vias and their effect on communication within the chip once they begin shrinking at future nodes. But what’s particularly interesting is that suddenly it brings everyone that abandoned Moore’s Law at 180nm back into the race. That means they will have no choice but to re-enter the market for advanced tools for everything from modeling to verification and software prototyping, and from layout to design for manufacturing.

Stacking die, for all its technological evolutionary roots, is a market discontinuity. And at every discontinuity in the industry there has been a scramble for market share, new tools and new customers. Let the race begin.

–Ed Sperling

From the outside it looks like business as usual, but the race for board seats on the GSA has become particularly competitive this year.

GSA originally was created as an organization for fabless companies, but you wouldn’t know that looking at its membership roster. It has evolved into a who’s who of the entire semiconductor supply chain, including everyone from foundries like TSMC and UMC to semiconductor companies like IBM, STMicroelectronics and Samsung to EDA providers like Synopsys and Cadence.

Virtually anyone can become a member of the GSA, and given the list of members it appears that a good portion of the industry has signed on. But you have to get elected to the board of directors, which basically puts you into the center of the customer and supplier ecosystem. The proof is in the attendance numbers. Average attendance at board meetings of non-profit organizations is roughly 50%. The GSA’s attendance is closer to 100%, according to GSA president Jodi Shelton.

For two board seats in two categories there are 13 different executives in the running from as many companies. One is for the broadly defined semiconductor board seat, where 10 different companies are competing. The second is a new category of value chain producers (VCPs), where eSilicon, Global Unichip, and Silicon 360 are each vying for the spot.

While most of this happens behind the scenes—the lobbying for votes with recorded messages and the campaigning to members—what’s interesting is the hidden message behind all of this. The GSA is representative of the industry, and increasingly no company can stand on its own. An SoC isn’t the work of a single company—even at big companies like Intel, IBM or Samsung—which means it’s now increasingly important to be at the center of the ecosystem to remain competitive.

That makes the stakes higher than ever before, and it means GSA elections should become even more hotly contested at every process node—most likely with new spinouts like the VCP definition. And like all complex designs these days, this should get very interesting.

–Ed Sperling

At the beginning of this decade a writer for a powerful newspaper told me that, come hell or high water, she wasn’t giving up print—no matter how important online got to be. I had to think about that for awhile before answering, “It may not be your choice.”

That newspaper is now a shadow of what it once was, but the statement keeps reminding me of some of the brash claims being made by electronics companies today. No matter how brilliant an idea seems on paper, it can be a colossal flop for unanticipated reasons. And no matter how idiotic something may look to established players, you always have to take it seriously. Who would have thought 20 years ago that you could sell a cup of coffee for nearly $4?

Intel’s entry into all markets doesn’t mean it will succeed in those markets. Likewise, just because the market leaders it is challenging now have dominance in those markets, it doesn’t mean they’ll keep it. IBM invented the PC and lost the market to lower-priced competitors. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player, but it now owns the market, while its share of the PC market remains small.

What’s getting interesting in the electronics world, though is that battles are no longer being fought by one company anymore. They’re being fought by ecosystems, and how those ecosystems fare against each other is unknown. To some extent it depends on how committed they are to each other. Is this like NATO or is it like the Allies in World War II?

Second, it is uncertain what will win out in technology. Will growth come at the low-end of the consumer market, or will there be enough growth at the high end to sustain more expensive development. To some extent, that depends on how fast developing markets mature and what their consumers are willing to buy, as well as how fast more mature markets recover from a very long and deep downturn.

And finally, it all depends on what sort of business context can be built around all of this. Apple’s genius in the MP3 world was iTunes. What that will be in netbooks, mobile Internet devices, set-top boxes and a variety of new form factors is unknown. And no matter how much money is thrown at solving the unknown, the results may still be unpredictable.

–Ed Sperling

There have been a bunch of job postings for semiconductor expertise in India, the United Kingdom, as well as places like South Korea (home to Samsung and LG), Switzerland (home to STMicro), and a smattering of offerings in Texas and parts of California outside of Silicon Valley. That either means companies are looking to cut costs by hiring workers in less expensive areas, or it means there are a bunch of new companies that have been financed coming out of the downturn to challenge the giants of tech.

My guess is both. That doesn’t mean Silicon Valley will disappear, of course. It’s still the core of innovation in tech, and it likely will remain so for many years to come. But it’s also an expensive place to live and do business, which is why there is a growing demand for expertise in other places.

Over the next six months, as the global economy begins its climb out of a giant economic crater excavated by ruthless bankers, financial traders and insurance companies, demand for jobs will pick up again everywhere. But what’s changed this time is that they’re being back-filled in places with the lowest overhead first, rather than stepping up operations in more expensive regions and then figuring out a way to offshore those jobs later.

The infrastructure for offshoring is already in place. Companies like Intel and IBM already have a major presence in India and China. And in a cyclical industry like semiconductors, you have to wonder what’s going to happen during the next downturn.

–Ed Sperling

The wall is in sight.

Moore’s Law has propelled the semiconductor industry at an amazing velocity since it was first introduced in 1965, and despite some minor changes from 18 months to two years, we have pretty much stayed on course. In the past, most people thought we would hit the wall at 1 micron, and they thought it would happen again at 32nm. The road map appears pretty solid down well beyond that.

But at 22nm—or the half node of 20nm—things seem to get a bit fuzzier than in the past. You can’t just fix one problem anymore. You have to fix a bunch of them simultaneously. And those problems become thornier as you progress down to 10nm. Even the fastest ASICs and processors will begin to look more like systems designs than chips, and designs will expand well beyond the physical limits of the silicon to include software, other components on a board and the manufacturing processes to create them.

This used to be so far in the future that no one really gave it much thought. It was something you talked about over a beer. But with companies now working on 32 nanometer IP blocks and manufacturing processes, it won’t be that long before we start seeing the wall. There will be ways around the wall, of course, but the path will hardly be a straight line.

At the very basic level, lithography technology will have to change. The move to extreme ultraviolet lithography has been talked about for years. TSMC already has committed publicly to immersion lithography. But which way the industry ultimately heads is the subject of lots of research at the moment. So far, there are no clear answers. Both technologies are subject to defects, and while those defects may not be significant at 180nm, they will ruin a chip at 20nm.

On top of that, new transistor designs will be needed. Chip designs already have started going vertical. Memory makers are using stacked die to create their chips. But we’re also starting to see the need for new transistor designs such as FinFETS, which have 3D fins resembling a 1958 Cadillac.

Add to that such technologies as air gap, new materials and substrates such as silicon-on-insulator, and suddenly the wall begins to take shape. From a distance it looks opaque, but up close it’s porous. The only problem is that getting through it requires a huge investment in new technology.

Moore’s Law originally was created as an economic statement of manufacturing economies of scale. The further down the road map, the more the economies of scale begin rolling out in reverse. Many companies have been wondering where the tipping point will be for Moore’s Law, and it varies by company. But the end of the road may be when the last company no longer gets a benefit from putting more transistors on a piece of silicon—no matter what shape they take or how exotic the substrate.

–Ed Sperling

Downturns have a way of changing things forever—sort of like the earthquake of 1812, which permanently re-routed the Mississippi River in three places. And while the common thinking is that things will go back to where they were before, they never do.

For one thing, the trend isn’t just smaller, faster, cheaper. It’s also shorter development cycles. Incredibly complex chips now take 12 to 18 months to design, verify and produce, versus three years a decade ago.

The only upside is that the basic designs sometimes last longer before they become completely obsolete. Moore’s Law is slipping, if it even applies at all. Trying to fit the formula into multicore chips and, in some cases, stacked die, is a stretch. And many companies have abandoned the Moore’s Law approach altogether, saying that older process nodes are sufficient for getting the job done.

Another change that is irreversible is globalization. There are more opportunities, more markets, and more trained people around the globe. The downside is more competition for skilled engineers at all levels—and that trend will only grow.  What used to be done in the United States, Europe or Japan can now be done using global teams.

The silver lining is that the cost of labor is less of a deciding factor. Global companies are paying the same wages around the globe for top talent. Instead of being reduced to the lowest common denominator, some companies are paying top dollar for engineers no matter where they are. IBM is a case in point. Experts say that will become more common over the next few years.

That also will fuel new market growth in some densely populated areas, such as India and China, where the opportunity for growth dwarfs the market for every piece of electronics that has ever been sold. 

In the system-level design space, where engineers live and breathe complexity, that also means the creation of new approaches and tools. While many companies still develop their own tools, best of breed is becoming a necessity rather than an option. And black-box strategies, such as TLM 2.0 and IP-XACT, will become necessary evils among engineers who were trained to understand every step of every action they take. And like the other irreversible trends, once these are tried and implemented there is no turning back.