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COPYRIGHT 2006 Publishers & Producers
The semiconductor industry sits at the world pinnacle of technology, and to stay there requires a unique collaboration of competitors working closely together to advance the state of the art. No other industry can claim a similar level of cooperation. For the semiconductor industry, that collaboration takes place in a formal way at a 370,000-square-foot facility in Austin, Texas, operated by Sematech, which stands for Semiconductor Manufacturing Technology.
But the world is quickly changing. Sematech realizes that the technical challenge of keeping the industry on the "Moore's Law" productivity curve, which is the doubling of chip capability every 18 to 24 months, will require the efforts of other industries that need to move with alacrity to adopt nanotechnologies. The ubiquitous spread of nanotechnology rests squarely on the processes developed by the semiconductor industry. With or without their knowledge, old-line industries will soon be addressing the colossal challenges that have confronted the semiconductor sector since its inception: the mass production of nano-scale products.
To survive, Sematech technology visionary and strategist Randy Goodall believes the leading competitors in other major industries must learn how to collaborate on projects that put them on the Moore's Law productivity curve.
Manufacturing & Technology News editor Richard McCormack recently interviewed Goodall about what is required for success not just of other industries, but of state and local jurisdictions as well as the United States economy as a whole.
As director of external programs for Sematech, Goodall is in charge of creating programs for technology-based economic development. He has been involved in many technical aspects of Sematech's operations. He holds a BS from Caltech in physics and a Masters and Ph.D. in experimental solid state physics from the University of Oregon. He can be reached at randy.goodall@ sematech.org. Here's what he had to say:
Question: Most industrial R&D consortia have a difficult time surviving and prospering. What is the reason for Sematech's success?
Goodall: Although it is easy to say the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 to 24 months or that the cost of building a transistor drops 30 percent per year, doing that is really hard. It is impossible for any one company to take a path of their own and get a lead in the market based on a radically different manufacturing paradigm. It's too expensive to invent a new way of doing it. Everyone continues to have to share the same essential manufacturing capability, which is extremely expensive to bring into existence. With companies spending between 10 to 20 percent of their revenue on R&D it creates the raw ingredients for collaboration.
Right now, there is a guy designing a cell phone or an I-Pod that he actually can't make. He trusts that at some point in the next 18 or 24 months when it goes to market that the chips he's going to need are going to be small enough and cheap enough that he can make a profit selling it. When he doesn't design a product that you can't have yet, that's when he's only going to want more of what he's got. At that point, it's the end of an era. The whole investment engine for the industry grinds to a halt. That is not a good thing.
Q: Why is collaboration so hard for most industries?...
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