SkyWater Technology, the trusted technology realization partner, today announced the company’s President, Thomas Sonderman will present a keynote address, “Manufacturing Leadership in the Era of Artificial Intelligence,” at the 2020 virtual Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) at 9:00 am EDT on August 24th. The presentation will discuss trade and technology dynamics pressuring the manufacturing sector and how a new foundry model can streamline productization for disruptive technologies to enable next-generation edge and cloud-computing infrastructure.
As 5G networks are scaling up, the IoT is rapidly scaling with it and the world is seeing an explosion of IoT devices and unprecedented volumes of data. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies with varying sophistication will be critical throughout this expanding ecosystem to realize the value of these data and will rely on continuously progressing compute performance to do so. However, as the industry sees transistor scaling providing diminishing returns, current IC paradigms do not appear suited to deliver the economics or performance the market requires and new dimensions must be pursued including new materials, new architecture, and heterogeneous integration. From a manufacturing standpoint, this is a challenge. Most conventional foundries are not organized with appropriate operational models, tooling, or business processes to innovate efficiently in these new dimensions.
Sonderman’s keynote will address this challenge by presenting a Technology as a Service (TaaS) for microelectronics manufacturing concept that has been demonstrated to facilitate foundry engagement at earlier technology and manufacturing readiness levels and ultimately accelerate time to market. According to Sonderman, “The industry is at an inflection point and the semiconductor manufacturing industry faces a choice between continuing down a known path with reducing returns or chart another path to find new technologies to meet the incessant market demand for more computing performance. The TaaS model is already driving significant innovation in the foundry space for next-wave quantum, cloud, and related computing technologies that will allow the industry to realize the future state of hierarchical AI throughout the IoT ecosystem.”