SEMI’s president and CEO Ajit Monacha and imec’s president and CEO Luc Van den hove kicked off the first day of SEMICON West with a discussion of the deeper collaboration between these two iconic semiconductor groups – one in the vendor networking space and the other a leader in nanotechnology research and development, respectively. The session was moderated by Betinna Weiss, SEMI’s chief of staff. A key focus of the discussion was on the need for industry roadmaps and the state of Moore’s Law.

As reported by Semiconductor Digest in partnership with the SEMI organization, Monacha said that roadmaps served as a guide for the industry to develop key strategies. For SEMI’s part, he said that volunteers Bill Bottoms and Bill Chen asked him for help with industry validation earlier this year. Since then, SEMI has sponsored many sessions of the Heterogeneous Integration Roadmap (HIR) at SEMI’s headquarters. The 22-chapter HIR Roadmap can be found on the SEMI website.

“Driving Moore’s Law is a large part of our mission,” said imec’s Van den hove. “We are convinced that Moore’s law is going to continue for several more generations. The most important reason is that there’s probably not an option not to continue Moore’s Law, because there is this enormous need for more computation and more data storage.”

He went on to explain that if the semi industry doesn’t develop more performance technology, exponentially increasing data volumes will lead to an exponential increasing — for example — energy consumption at data centers. Fortunately, he felt that the industry, with the help of Moore’s Law, could handle the challenge. “We have the lithography roadmap, and the fact that EUV entered manufacturing last year, I think is a very important tipping point that allows this continuation of Moore’s law. At the same time, we have a device roadmap to bring us to sub 1nm dimensions. What is going to be important is that we find ways to keep the cost under control so that we can also adhere to the economic version of Moore’s Law,” he said.

Van den hove said this way of innovation is important because of the need to link system requirements with the basic technology development. “In the past, we could have a sequential way of innovating where one part of the value chain brings innovation to the next part of the value chain. What we need now is to bring all the key players of the value chain together and approach innovation from a more network type of way,” he said. “That’s where the strength of bringing those networks together — bringing SEMI and imec together — is so valuable.”