Introducing the Silicon Beyond
Hello, and welcome to the inaugural edition of Silicon Beyond, a new blog devoted to the trends and technologies that will guide the very future of the electronics industry. Colossal leaps in technology can come in many different forms. For example, minute reductions geometries can bring about huge changes to the semiconductor manufacturing landscape, allowing for cheaper devices that are easier to mass produce. Meanwhile, revolutionary advancements in the form of innovative manufacturing techniques and highly inventive new products constantly threaten to shift and redefine the technology landscape. In all circumstances, no matter how revolutionary a new product or technology can be, it’s ultimately up to the end consumer to decide if it will truly take hold to become the industry standard, or simply fade away into obscurity.
A vital issue that marketers and product developers often wrestle with is how to effectively create an innovative product that will generate enough buzz that will in turn pique consumer interest to a sufficient level resulting in the making of a hit product. In the ultra-competitive consumer electronics market especially, shoppers have more choice in terms of technology, brand, price, and features than ever before and even a fantastic idea can simply wither away if it fails to capture the public imagination.
It all begins with product imagination coupled with strong grasp of the modern consumer. Once upon a time, it was adequate to stay one step ahead of the competition with current generation technologies. But in today’s world, manufacturers no longer have any time to rest on their laurels. A dramatic reduction in the consumer product life cycle means that they must constantly be aware of and searching out new methods of production. A miscalculation could result in the irrevocable loss of market share to a hungry competitor in just a matter of months, instead of years.
Obviously, not all ideas are created equal, and OEMs must make difficult decisions on which are truly worth investing time and money into. Part analysis, part opinion, Silicon Beyond will offer a regular peek into the cutting edge technologies from conception to factory floor, as well speculations into their full potential.
About the author
Matthew Scherer, a semiconductor market research analyst at research firm Databeans Inc, will be posting to this blog regularly. He tracks the latest trends in all major IC categories and end markets, but he is primarily focused in consumer electronics, audio, industrial, and embedded markets. Matthew also publishes a monthly newsletter for Databeans, Inc and has submitted materials that have since been quoted in the national press by publications including EETimes, CNBC, Fox News, Nikkei Electronics, Digitimes, the Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, and US News and World Report. Matthew currently resides in Seattle, Washington, where he enjoys hiking, cooking, tech gadgets, gaming, and live music.
Meredith Poor commented:
Yumm... Fresh Meat. Some of your fellow columnists understand what this means.
A cell phone is, basically, a phone. The idea of texting and voice mail and an on-board camera aren't particularly novel extentions of consumer devices that have been in use, in some form, over the last century.
A 'smart phone', however, is a completely different animal. Now one is carrying what is, from the perspective of a user, a computer, with all it's complexities. Now one is concerned with memory capacity, security, installed applications and periodic upgrades, display size and resolution, data exchange, and a whole raft of other problems. Often a consumer using one of these will find it's obsolete in a year, just about the time they have figured it out.
'Minute reductions in geometry' might restructure the landscape, but it isn't just consumer electronics manufacturers that have to cope with it. Consumers are being handed supercomputers to carry in their pockets and purses, and given the population of 250 million over the age of 12 in the US, such adaptations are not trivial. Consumers bought a lot of PCs in 1980 when IBM shifted market perception from 'hobby' to 'personal'. Most were effectively junked within weeks.
As an excercise, you might try the following: use a 3D design tool to define a part, such as might be used in an aircraft, and send it to a contract manufacturer to be fabricated in titanium. Point: we can all be creative, but the inventory of technologies is far beyond what any one person will ever use.
Before one even gets to the smart phone, the software development environment has the same problem: use Java, C#, PHP, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, Javascript, etc? Design for Winforms or Web? Even highly proficient programmers can't keep all this straight, and so the choices made in system development freqently turn out to be inappropriate, a discovery made well after significant investment is made in the project. Once the program is also designed for mobile, the interface issues just get worse.
If you wanted to surround your house with wind turbines; solar panels; and a water collection, purification, and recycling system, would you trust a contractor to set this all up? Would you trust them to support it over a 10 to 30 year service life? The technology to do all this is available, but an actual implmentation would take a pretty sophisticated engineer. 'Everyone' 'needs' something like this, in some capacity or another, however few would be willing to attempt it.
The number of vendors is rising exponentially. Does it matter whether this is due to people losing their day jobs, or because they see an opportunity based on a skill they mastered in someone else's employ? How are all these actors going to make themselves visible? The semiconductor industry is a 'seep': nutrients flow out of vents, and 'tubeworms' feast on them. One has to not only design and fabricate a chip, but also a board, a box, a software package, an on-line service, a support staff, documentation, and training. Some of these things might make far more difference in the acceptance of a novel product.
