Date: 20/07/2009

Semiconductor can drive recession out but not vice-versa

The electronics, mainly the semiconductors have the capability to provide solutions to the problems seen during this recession. Semiconductor industry can address the broad spectrum of issues facing both developed regions and least developed regions.

Since the birth of semiconductor device it's delivering exponential benefit to this modern human being.

If you look at the semiconductor industry closely, the big is not really very powerful. The real winner is the one who is offering a mix of ultimate technology and the cost advantage. The bottomline is finally to save the end-user time and money and now recently providing good health and clean environment to the end-user.

In past 30 years, few of the semiconductor companies to name, which have grown amid the biggies, are Intel, Qualcomm, and Broadcom.

If you look at Intel, it's continuously offering processors, which have boosted the PC performance to save end users resources (again time and money). Return on investment on a PC is stayed higher until recently the mobile phone has taken over.

Freescale, which was earlier under the management of Motorola, is no ordinary company. It has a long successful history. Same thing can be said about TI, NXP (was earlier with Philips), ST Micro, Infineon (Earlier associated with Siemens) and few Japanese and Korean Semiconductor companies. Before Intel launching x86 chips, most of these above said and other companies were bigger than Intel. Intel grew because it's products saved more money and time to the end-user than the other's products. AMD on the other side offered equally powerful processors at low price, that's also a market-win solution.

When PC has matured, the speed of connectivity was bothering the users; Broadcom solved this problem by designing the chips, which can enable voice range bandwidth limited telephone lines to provide Internet to home at 57kbps. Broadcom is continuously producing devices enhancing speed of connectivity. Again the 'time saving' advantage to the end-user which is money saving advantage also.

Mobile phones are not just time and money saving tool, its far more beneficial. Before inventing CDMA mobile phone technology, TDMA or old version GSM was not technically designed to handle bandwidth required for today's phone penetration. Qualcomm gave that advantage of low cost phones to the end-user by developing CDMA chips.

It's not that newly born semiconductor firms are only helping the end user to save their resources. These fast grown companies are ahead of others in many aspects of resource saving. It's not really startup or top ranked vendor, what matters is, how good is the business model in saving time and money of end user of your device.


Along with information and communication issues, the new problems faced by the end users are lack of clean energy, clean transportation, and health facility. All these opportunities throw tens of billion dollars of market for semiconductor devices.

With nanometer technology, lab-on- a-chip and other time saving software and hardware systems can be developed for life sciences fields to research faster for the bio-related problems, so that better health to both plant and animal can be provided.

The opportunities for startups are immense. The problem is, they look more at successful businesses rather than solving economic problems of today's society.

The health care and environment are common issues faced by developed and developing world. When it comes health care medical electronics has immediate opportunities in handheld electronic devices for diagnosis, medical information systems, preventive health care gadgets. So, when electronic engineer notices any problem, immediately engineer can come out with some idea by using the power of semiconductors. That's the power of today's semiconductor.

Is it really shortage of good engineers? Or only few engineers with business intel trying to block other from entering? Or is it both? Whatever may be the answer, powerful solutions can emerge amid negative forces.