"We don't just have to deal with the complexity of silicon microchips. In a systemic and complex era, it is impossible to avoid risks only in the single area and the risks are rising;" said Aart de Geus, CEO of EDP supplier Synopsys. The founder GlobalFoundries said at the annual technology forum held in the United States.
De Geus believes that manufacturers need not only co-develop chips, but also network systems and network services if they want to succeed. If any part of the ecosystem goes wrong, all manufacturers face the risk of failure: "This is a winner-take-all. The situation is that the entire ecosystem is competing for high-yield systems, so the value chain has become very important."
"As the products become more complex, there is no single company that can supply everything, but there are a few that can supply most of the parts needed in the system." Warren East, chief executive of ARM, particularly praised Apple in this respect.
In the face of fierce competition, "sometimes it is difficult for vendors to share information, but we must establish a deeper relationship and a broader ecosystem;" represents another company EDA supplier Mentor, the company's chief executive Wally Rhines attended Robert Hum, general manager of the Graphics Deep Micron Products Division, said.
Hum further pointed out: "In the field of wafer design, the complexity of data set-up and manufacturing is getting higher and higher, and the design-for-manufacturing rules are moving toward the highest levels."
The tolerances of process technology have approached the design rule margin, which also affects the yield of wafers, and may even appear only in single digits when the new process node first attempts production; de Geus pointed out that This means that changes in the field of IC design have more easily affected semiconductor manufacturing yields.
Hum said that using design abstractions and modeling helps reduce the complexity of digital design, but it doesn't work in analog design: "We have to clarify what we can do in analog design. Efficiency; digital (IC design) world has made great progress, but there are still many things to be done in the analog world."
De Geus compared the work done by a company like GlobalFoundries to a "high-tech restaurant," and had to provide a large number of menus with different menu contents in a coordinated schedule: "Because kitchen equipment costs a lot. Billions of dollars, so you have to make sure the food is really delicious, and the guests usually don't thank you for the complicated things."
"As long as they have to pay, we will not be accounting for it." Mojy Chian, senior vice president of GlobalFoundries Design Support Department, who hosted the forum, responded; At this time, Lip-Bu Tan, chief executive of EDA supplier Cadence, secretly silenced: "Someone Did you talk about the problem of food poisoning?" It made the atmosphere of the forum a lot easier.
A number of senior executives said at a forum that the electronics industry has entered an era of “systemic complexity†and that manufacturers in the expanding ecosystem need to work more closely together.