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 An electronic dinosaur? I
write this as I am returning from Electronica 96, probably the world's largest electronic component exhibition, which is held every two years in Munich. If you've never been, let me tell you, Electronica is enormous: 25 halls of varying sizes are dedicated to everything to do with electronic components, their design, and their design-in to systems. There are miles of aisles to walk down, more than two thousan
d exhibitor companies, and 84,000 visitors. This was my last visit to Electronica at the Messegelande, the wooded show ground close to Munich's center. In 1998, Electronica will move to a larger venue being constructed on the eastern outskirts of the city. I fear it's going to have a rather antiseptic feel, away from the bustle of the city center, but it will give the show the opportunity to get even bigger-- if it can.
And there's the rub. In a chance encounter at the show with Joe D'Elia, senior semiconductor analyst with Dataquest Europe, we got around to talking about which semiconductor companies were present and which were not. Of course, all the major and minor European semiconductor makers were there--this is Europe's premier electronics event, after all. But there was no LSI Logic, no VLSI Technology, no AMD. IBM Microelectronics was listed in the door-stop of a book which is the show's catalogue, but the booth seemed to have been occupied by one of the world's leading fabless semiconductor co mpanies, Xilinx Inc. Lucent Technologies was absent, as was NEC. And what of the Koreans? No Hyundai, nor LG Semicon, leaving only Samsung to fly the flag. Of course, we are coming to the end of a year that has seen DRAM prices collapse and, as a result, the value of the annual worldwide semiconductor market is predicted to fall by 10 percent this year. So perhaps it should be no surprise that some semiconductor companies felt obliged to cut their cloth according to their means. Maybe these companies will attend the show in two years time. Or they won't. In the '70s and early '80s, the electronics industry was enabled by innovation in standard, mass-produced components, buttressed by the ability of systems companies to put them together in innovative combinations. But we have now entered the age of system-level integration. The true value of the electronics equipment is likely to reside in a system-level ASIC: a custom design. Microprocessor cores for embedding in ASICs are already common. Manufa cturing with 0.25-micron design rules, which is imminent, will allow significant amounts of DRAM to come onto the system-level ASIC. In addition, the semiconductor companies still want to achieve the economies of scale that they achieved with volume standard components. So they tend to adopt a key-account strategy, and talk, privately, to relatively few systems companies that they feel can go to high volume. As a result, the trend is for more technical discussions between vendor and customer to become private, more proprietary--and a for an enormous event like Electronica to becomes less relevant. Semiconductor technology is the engine of the electronics business, and I predict that if more semiconductor vendors stay away, a comprehensive range and impressive amount of complementary electronics technology at Electronica will not be enough to maintain its size, never mind help it grow. The dinosaurs were enormous, powerful creatures but that did not assure their survival.
Peter Clarke is
EE Times's
London-based European correspondent. He will dispatch these Letters from Europe periodically.
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