Sustaining Innovation in the Semiconductor Industry

Innovation has both technology and business aspects and bridging the valleys of death from invention to commercialization requires constant adaptation as an industry evolves. In its early days, the semiconductor industry consisted of startups and spinouts, financed by venture capital. Beginning in the 1990s, advantages of specialization lead to the rise of foundries and fabless companies, which are now consolidating to a few dominant leaders in each competitive space. Throughout its history, the industry has innovated by effectively leveraging collaboration mechanisms to fund university research, produce technology roadmaps, conduct research and development and improve manufacturing practices. Significant innovation and entrepreneurship are necessary to realize the next growth wave of semiconductor-based solutions based on A.I and ubiquitous sensors (Internet of Things). However, indicators ranging from IPO’s to venture capital investment to chip design costs strongly suggest new business models are needed, and inspiration can be found in adjacent technology sectors such as software, biotechnology, and pharmaceuticals. In this context, a new early-stage startup incubator called Silicon Catalyst has been launched in Silicon Valley and has been operational for three years. Its unique focus is on semiconductor solutions by creating a supporting ecosystem to address the prototyping needs of today’s chip design entrepreneurs. Limitations associated with continuing conventional scaling of CMOS (Moore’s Law) will challenge our ability to advance system performance. Optimistically, this will motivate the formation of new public-private partnerships to support concurrent innovations within the technology stack (materials, devices, computing architectures, algorithms and software).