Article By : Keysight Applied sciences Inc.
Keysight’s Ee Huei Sin talks concerning the state of the electronics provide chain and new tendencies as we head in direction of 2024.
Ee Huei Sin, President of Keysight Applied sciences’ Digital Industrial Options Group, based mostly in Penang, Malaysia, talks concerning the state of the electronics provide chain and new tendencies as we head in direction of 2024.
What are the primary challenges within the world electronics manufacturing provide chain?
In 2022, the world celebrated the seventy fifth anniversary of the transistor, and the sixty fifth anniversary of the built-in circuit. Since then, we now have developed from a single amplifier block to a 3000-transistor wafer within the Nineteen Seventies to a nanometer course of that may accommodate 50 billion transistors onto a chip the scale of a fingernail. Within the final 35 years, the semiconductor market grew from over US$30B to greater than US$600B, creating thousands and thousands of employment alternatives.
Optimism is now surging by means of the semiconductor area. Billions are being spent by governments, chip makers, and tools and supplies suppliers. To achieve the US$1 Trillion business that’s being predicted by 2030, the business should double in measurement. With funding effectively underway from the U.S. CHIPS Act, European, and Japanese legislative equivalents goal open-innovation partnership approaches to R&D and capital funding to strengthen provide chains.
East Asia accounts for 75 % of world semiconductor manufacturing, and greater than 90 % of probably the most superior chips are made in Taiwan and South Korea. Nonetheless, the semiconductor market has confirmed fairly unstable over the previous few years as a consequence of current provide chain challenges.
As world funding continues at a really excessive price, the challenges of overcoming shortages, assembly expertise wants, and creating resilient and sustainable provide chains – in addition to addressing complicated geopolitical points, are prone to persist into 2024.
What’s driving development?
Based mostly on the expansion in high-speed knowledge necessities, we see even better knowledge calls for for purposes sooner or later. The Web of Issues (IoT), autonomous vehicles, and the rollout of 5G and coming 6G networks are already upon us with monumental high-speed knowledge necessities.
As well as, future new purposes which haven’t but been invented will create a necessity for better bandwidth and the implied reliance on superior semiconductors to assist these new applied sciences. These might contain future digital actuality worlds within the metaverse, or one thing not but even imagined.
What method is required, to handle future wants?
Innovation is essential. Whether or not creating the following wave of cellphone infrastructure, or the following era of self-driving vehicles, producers will rely upon next-gen design, emulation, and check options for his or her high quality and efficiency testing – which themselves require extra succesful, numerous, differentiated semiconductor applied sciences.
Sensible, built-in applied sciences can assist buyer check and measurement wants by enabling customers to check next-gen gadgets whereas their merchandise are nonetheless beneath growth. For instance, take into account a 5G subbase station cell tower with amplifiers that transmit indicators out to cell telephones. To precisely check amplifier noise and linearity, check and measurement methods should be an order of magnitude higher in every parameter in comparison with the gadget being measured.
International digitalisation, just-in-time distributed processing with greater throughput and decrease latency on customized chips and compute engines, and new applied sciences corresponding to silicon photonics, millimeter-wave (mmWave) and high-power gadgets are all spurring new semiconductor manufacturing development.
To pave the best way for future technological improvements, it’s equally vital to create breakthroughs in check and measurement processes. Manufacturing of customized semiconductors will due to this fact be key to assembly future market calls for for extremely complicated electronics merchandise, and such improvements in chip-making will likely be important to remain forward of the speedy growth of latest product launches and next-gen options earlier than they get rolled out within the years forward. Construct-it-yourself method to chip-making may even make sure that testing applied sciences meet the very best requirements for high quality and efficiency.
Ee Huei Sin is President of the Digital Industrial Options Group at Keysight Applied sciences. Based mostly in Penang, Malaysia, she manages a broad portfolio of companies that deal with the automotive, power, normal electronics, manufacturing, training, and semiconductor industries around the globe. Huei Sin has been with Keysight and its predecessor firms, Agilent, and Hewlett-Packard, for greater than 30 years and has held a number of management positions spanning engineering, advertising, manufacturing, order success, and enterprise administration. She holds a bachelor’s diploma in Microelectronics & Physics from Campbell College, North Carolina, and an Govt Schooling certification from Columbia Enterprise College.
