SEMICON West 2008 Day 2: Mobile electronics

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Mobile electronics and connectivity were key themes addressed by keynote speakers on the second day of SEMICON West 2008.

“What’s new is that the Internet is going mobile,” said Gadi Singer, vice president of Intel’s Mobility Group and general manager of the company’s SOC Enabling Group. “We are in the midst of a major revolution.”

The number of mobile Internet users will triple to 1.2 billion by 2012, according to Singer, and a lot of those will be the so-called “millennials” who have grown up with iPods and YouTube. “This is a technology savvy generation who will have different expectations,” he said.

Singer pointed out that good old fashioned Moore’s Law is what will enable the industry to meet increasing technology demands and new user expectations.

“If you take a simple projection on what can be done you can see that by 2013, around 5 years from now, we can see devices that have 1 billion logic transistors on the go,” explained Singer. “We already have 1 billion transistors in high end products, but I’m talking here about mobile devices.”

“It is the ability to follow Moore’s Law that gives us mobile devices that have this high functionality with very high complexity,” he added. “We do not see any slowdown in the case of scaling,” he said.

One of the new classes of mobile device will be the so-called “netbook”: a notebook focused around Internet usage. “This is one of these that enable the next big wave of usage and new markets,” he said.

An important consideration is how mobile devices will interact with other devices in the environment. “There will be a lot of stationary devices that will interact with your mobile device to give you the best experience. The mobile revolution is not only driving the mobile devices, but a whole system of connected devices that create experience together,” said Singer.

Another necessary part of the equation to make this all happen is industry collaboration, according to the Intel executive. “We need to continue to collaborate…so the whole industry can move much faster and innovate within this space,” he said.

Singer said the mobile electronics industry was far from mature and is beginning on a decade of extraordinary growth and value creation. “This is an area where leaders small and large can come, show the difference and become successful,” he said.

The second keynote speaker on the topic of mobile electronics was Grant Seiffert, president of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA).

The theme of his presentation was “speed up, curves ahead”. Industry players need to speed up to come out of the curves head or risk losing market share to competitors, according to Seiffert.

He cited data to show the explosive growth of wireless communications. By 2009, wireless service revenues in the U.S. will exceed revenues of wireline services. And by 2011, global telecommunications revenues will reach $5 trillion. A big part of the growth will come from Asia, where telecoms revenues grew by 17 percent last year. In Asia, wireless subscribers alone grew 20 percent last year to 1.3 billion, according to Seiffert.

He also focused on the role of the millennial generation, pointing out that they were born into a wireless world and are not afraid of it. “They speak a different language that we need to pay attention to as an industry,” he said.

Companies that want to survive in this new market will need to take into account that the new generation of tech users have no brand loyalty, they want personalization, and unless it can be downloaded from the Internet, “they won’t use it”, according to Seiffert.