Just a decade ago, a somewhat anemic semiconductor industry embarked on a new journey fueled by high growth hopes for IoTs, cloud computing, and emerging machine learning. Navigating this path was challenging, as the outlook for Moore’s Law faced skepticism with semi technology advances having slowed down.
Fast forward to today, as we mark imec’s 40th anniversary: our landscape has greatly morphed with a bold 2030, trillion-dollar semiconductor forecast and breathtaking technology advances on the near horizon!
Following the classic ‘chicken and egg’ positive feedback loop of ‘technology-enablement’ and ‘application-impact’, we have just entered multi-decade exponential advances of enormous consequence. Top-down, we see pervasive-AI deeply impacting products, processes, and potentially the very essence of mankind. Bottom-up, the race towards Angstrom-sized devices is multiplied by high-connectivity multi-die systems driving Tera-transistor compute power. The intersection of top-down demand and bottom-up supply is truly catalytic, and the present vitality of our field cannot be overestimated.
In his address, de Geus will characterize the next two decade ‘SysMoore’ era as audaciously fusing ‘systemic complexity’ with the ‘exponential ambition’ our industry has always embraced. Delivering software-defined architectures implemented on multi-die structures will require great cooperation and teamwork in multiple disciplines. What better location than imec, to in concert unleash these new exponential hits by the exponential formerly known as Moore’s Law!
