Call to speed up innovations in semicon sector

BALTIMORE, US: Research in semiconductors is lacking in new ideas, and innovations in emerging technologies should be sped up, according to Pushkar Apte, vice-president (technology programs) of the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA).

He was speaking at the International Electron Devices Meeting, held in Baltimore, the United States, where about 1,200 researchers gathered to present papers on, and to discuss, the latest trends in the semiconductor sector, which is 40-50 years old.

According to Apte, everything has a life-cycle and “we have had a good ride on the crest of the silicon wave.”

The semiconductor industry has to become part of a “larger whole” than itself, Apte stressed, adding that the industry needs a virtual, multi-university inter-disciplinary eco-system to move forward.

Pushkar Apte described this “new entity” as the ‘National Brain’ – a virtual Bell Labs run on the Internet. The idea behind the so-called National Brain, Apte added, is to get several inputs on research subjects interchanged and co-mingled into a large data bank, till the combined result of the research comes out with a new, usable, low-cost manufacturable substance.

The very high costs of design and manufacture of silicon in the current global economic recession has brought the technology sector to a stage where cooperative research is required.

The Semiconductor Industry Association is going to work, in the long term, with governments as well as academic laboratories, deviating from the practice of just making use of the industry’s laboratories, Pushkar Apte told the gathering of researchers at the International Electron Devices Meeting.