This confirms it's the "process thingy" (TM Yousef)
"In a comment sure to bring notice from Taiwan, Smith said that the Super IDMs appeared to be pulling away from the foundries because of just this issue. "IBM and Intel have the low-K dielectrics, the copper and the 0.13 processes working," he said. "The foundries are still having trouble getting all of these into production."
Downturn could revamp high-tech arena
By Ron Wilson, EE Times
Oct 2, 2002 (1:17 PM)
URL: eetimes.com
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Shaped in the shadow of high tech's longest recession, a new electronics industry is emerging, an analyst suggests, one that will see major players stumble and others rise to replace them.
The upturn will bring a major change in the geographic distribution of the electronics industry, said Gary Smith, chief analyst at Gartner Dataquest, who also predicted a shift in the kinds of companies that dominate the industry, and, at last, a fundamental change in the process of design.
"We are now in our eighth quarter of industry recession," Smith told the Magma Users' Group here, surpassing the five quarters that had previously marked the industry's longest uninterrupted downturn.
The length and depth of the downturn has led to a new mentality among some electronics people, Smith said. This group — Flat Earthers, Smith called them — "is saying that there are no more killer applications for electronics. They are saying that we will never see historic growth rates again. These statements are just as false as that famous quotation from the head of the patent office saying that all the useful inventions had been made. By the way, I researched that one, and he never said it."
New realities
Rather than the end of history, Smith sketched a gradually reforming industry, building itself among new realities. He predicted that new companies will grow to importance — and that important companies will fail.
"The interesting thing is that companies don't fail during the downturn," Smith said. "Most companies fail during the upturn as a result of things they did during the downturn."
Smith sees major changes coming. First, and already visible, is geographic. "Europe is gaining market share," Smith said. "That is simply because they lead the world in system design skills. In North America, we are seeing a major reshuffling. Some familiar names will be gone six years from now. But in comparison, Japan is in a much more serious situation. Sometimes Japan almost appears completely lost."
In contrast, Smith said, the most intense global competition was breaking out in South Asia. "China is emerging. And they are not following the traditional developing-world model of buying into low-cost manufacturing. China has a three-pronged strategy to be the world's low-cost manufacturer, the world's foundry and the world's IC design center."
Taiwan, Smith said, was struggling to stay ahead of the mainland. Korea was just shifting its attention from manufacturing to design and Singapore's strategy remained unclear. Smith said that the big wild card in the race was India, with a huge and growing pool of designers that now included a significant number of power users. "If they can get the designs they will be a major factor," Smith said. At least one major Chinese electronics venture has opened a design center in India, he said later.
In this new order a new company model — the Super Integrated Device Manufacturer, already established by IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. — will dominate, Smith projected. It will be characterized not by dominance in chip design but by dominance of a software architecture, he said, a hegemony spanned not only the CPU cores — the heart of the strategy — but also control of the instruction set architecture and software development tools.
In a comment sure to bring notice from Taiwan, Smith said that the Super IDMs appeared to be pulling away from the foundries because of just this issue. "IBM and Intel have the low-K dielectrics, the copper and the 0.13 processes working," he said. "The foundries are still having trouble getting all of these into production."
Smith also identified another emerging company model, the Integrated Device Designer. "This is just like the Super IDM, except for not having the fab," he said, citing Altera Corp., Xilinx Inc. and Nvidia Corp. as examples. |
