SEMICON West 2008 keynotes

SAN FRANCISCO, USA: Taking a holistic approach to technology innovation and surviving the brutal DRAM industry were topics covered by the two keynote speakers on the opening day of SEMICON West 2008.

Bernie Meyerson, vice president for strategic alliances and CTO of the IBM Systems and Technology Group, pointed out that faster transistors will only be part of the technology solution going forward.

“IT performance will remain on its trajectory,” he explained. However, this performance growth will be driven not by technology alone, more by overall architectural developments. “We really will move to a different structure in the IT industry that will drive different needs in the semiconductor and supplier industry,” according to Meyerson.

Meyerson addressed the issue of out-of-control R&D costs that are forcing competing companies to partner on technology development. “The costs of developing a node are going through the roof because of the complexities,” he said. “It used to be you invented one new thing per generation. Now you are doing 10 to 15 . It’s amazing what that does to your costs.” For example, cost estimates for developing the 22 nanometer node range from $2 to $2.5 billion.

To spread the cost and risk, IBM has developed the Center for Semiconductor Research at Albany, New York State, where competitors in the device industry have put aside their differences to work on joint process development. Meyerson said equipment and materials suppliers are now becoming involved because they recognize the value of being able to test their products at native dimensions.

“This is becoming a semiconductor eco-system which is where we had aimed it and where we seemed to have wound up,” he said.

In his concluding remarks, Meyerson noted that the “road forward will look very different from the road traveled.” He predicted: “Technology shrinks will “abate as a lever within the decade. It’s not that people won’t try to make things smaller, denser, faster, cheaper…but if we are counting on that to drive the performance you are wasting your time.”

The opening keynote speaker at SEMICON West 2008, Yukio Sakamoto, president and CEO of Elpida Memory, outlined strategies his company has adopted to survive the DRAM market.

To compete more effectively Elpida has shifted from “me-too” products to unique products and from commodity markets to niche markets with high growth prospects. The company has also entered into a series of partnerships with companies such as Qimonda, UMC and Powerchip. “The objective of the partnerships is to achieve lower cost and higher performance DRAMS,” said Sakamoto.

The Elpida CEO said that in order to achieve profitability, semiconductor companies need to shift from making chips to becoming end-system companies.

To streamline the internal operations, Sakamoto has mandated that meetings must finish within one hour, written reports must fit onto one A4 page, and email responses must be given within 24 hours. Further, Elpida employees spend 85 percent of their time is devoted to customer visits, alliance building and “pure work”, whereas in a typical Japanese company, 50 percent of the time is spent on internal meetings and a further 25 percent of preparing materials for presentations, according to Sakamoto.