Thought leaders address ‘Smart’ future at SEMICON

The a bevy of veteran speakers rounds out the keynote address lineup at this year’s SEMICON West conference, including executives from Intel, GlobalFoundries and Tokyo Electron Ltd (TEL). 

The main focus to the presentations includes explanations of how the industry is driving advances in emerging ‘Smart’ technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, 5G connectivity and IoT through innovative, new processes and collaboration across the extended manufacturing supply chain.

SEMICON West offers 115 hours of advanced programming and more than 600 exhibits. The industry’s flagship event will be held July 11-13 at Moscone Center in San Francisco CA.

Following welcomes from SEMI America’s president Dave Anderson and SEMI CEO Ajit Manocha, TEL’s Tetsuro Higashi, a 40-year industry veteran, will present The Semiconductor Industry: Changed and Unchanged. In his address, Higashi will detail how global competition and collaboration have enabled semiconductor devices to achieve tremendous performance advances over the years. Higashi notes that in the near future the industry will create new forms of intelligence that extend human capabilities and creativity. According to Higashi, the union of Big Data, AI, and 5G communications will yield breakthrough applications in biomedical, art, music, and other creative human endeavors. For the future, Higashi envisions AI as a force empowering human creativity, working collaboratively, not in competition.

GlobalFoundries Thomas Caulfield, will present Accelerating Innovation: Intelligent Is the New Smart (July 11). After 17 years at IBM, Dr. Caulfield joined GlobalFoundries in 2014, where he heads up the company’s leading-edge semiconductor wafer manufacturing facility. Caulfield will describe how smart devices, sensors, and advanced connectivity are creating a whole new, intelligent world driven by AI, AR, and machine learning. He asserts that the industry must innovate beyond advances in scaling, and that collaboration between customers, partners, and even competitors will be the key to keeping the IC where it’s always been: “at the center of connected intelligence.”

Kathy Winter of Intel’s Automated Driving Group will present the keynote Big Data in Autonomous Driving (July 12). Winter observes that, facing of a tidal wave of data, autonomous vehicles will need to navigate new environments, continuously update HD maps, anticipate what other cars will do, and learn from the collective knowledge of others on the road. New technologies will enable some 4TB of daily data, per vehicle, between car and cloud. Winter will describe how Intel is partnering with the ecosystem to develop an end-to-end, autonomous driving solution that encompasses the car, connectivity, and cloud. “No one company can do it alone,” she says, pointing to Intel’s work with BMW and Mobileye.

www.semiconwest.org