Supercomputer in your pocket soon!

The semiconductor and electronics industries are seeking to put a supercomputer in your pocket, probably in the shape of a clam shell cell phone. This is the way how Aurangzeb Khan, corporate vice-president, Cadence Design Systems, tool makers to chip designers, brought home high technology to the mass consumer who just wants to plug and play.

He told the Vision Summit of the Indian Semiconductor Association in Bangalore on Wednesday that it is consumer electronics, which will deliver semiconductor growth and had a warning for technology firms that it was a binary world and to be second was to be out.

Perhaps in response to the angst in India over its inability to host one-half of the semiconductor industry, manufacturing, Francois Guibert, corporate vice-president at STMicroelectronics, assured the audience that semiconductors will come naturally once the electronics industry arrives. What is needed is strong support from government (historically from defence in the US and MITI in Japan) and partnership with technology industries.

India has the market potential, stable and increasingly high growth, an industrial structure and exemplary technological capabilities. Europe can partner it in telecommunications (mobile phones), smart cards, digital set top boxes and automotive electronics, in all of which it had state-of-the-art capabilities, he added.

India has a good chance to catch the next big wave that hits the global semiconductor industry, agreed Ulf Schneider, managing director of Infineon Technologies (India). Semiconductors, which sit at the heart of not just electronics but almost everything else (there is a semiconductor device in most devices these days), will be driven by a few key enablers.

These are capabilities in software, integrated circuit design and the robustness and availability of key supply chain elements like electronic design automation tools. All these are present in India.

Dwelling on the next challenge in the field of semiconductors during the vision summit, he foresaw a breaking down of the wall between semiconductor design and manufacturing.

Designing will have to be increasingly done for manufacturability (that aspect will get attention very early in the designing cycle) and cooperation between designing and manufacturing will change the design, lithography (the etching of circuits on silicon) and backend elements of chips.

Devices will keep getting smaller "� this is the age of sub 100 micron chips "� and technological challenges will get more difficult. But that will not affect the arrival of new technology. Yield ramp-ups will get faster and these will directly contribute to the bottomline, Schneider foresaw.

Designers will have to live with greater constraints. Designing teams will be larger as more specific skills will be needed and cover more disciplines. With bigger teams, communication will assume a key role as designers will need to listen to others and change.

A key trend of the future will be manifold convergence "� of implementation technologies, geography and applications. Chip development will take place globally (more cross country partnerships) and will embrace different applications. There will be little difference in the basic capabilities of chips that reside in a digital TV, set top box or cellular phone, he added.