Bill McClean
Page 1 of 3
EE Times
(12/18/2008 9:23 PM EST)
Tired of all the gloom-and-doom annual forecasts for the worldwide economy and IC industry?
It's true that, when viewed on an annual basis, the 2009 worldwide economy will be classified as a global recession and the 2009 IC industry will register negative growth.
However, when viewed on a quarterly basis, a 'bottom' period and a 'recovery' period are highly likely to be encountered within the next 9 months. So, before we all go looking for tall buildings to jump off of, let's step back, take a deep breath, and look at some very powerful and positive forces that will be at work in 2009.
These include :
1. Stimulus packages
China has announced a $586 billion economic stimulus program to take place throughout 2009 and 2010, the Euro-zone recently announced a $256 billion stimulus package, the United Kingdom could have a $45 billion package itself, and the United States is expected to announce up to an $850 billion stimulus package in late January or early February of next year.
There is little doubt that, in total, worldwide stimulus packages, including from Taiwan, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Brazil, etc., will likely approach $2 trillion over the next two years. This is powerful medicine for a sick economy.
2. Lower interest rates
U.S. interest rates are at an historic low (now zero percent to 0.25 percent) and are expected to remain at these levels for some time. Moreover, the rest of the world is also moving to significantly lower interest rates.
In addition to record low interest rates, the U.S. Federal Reserve is initiating a massive purchase program for mortgage-backed securities. Already, 30-year fixed loans have dropped below 5 percent. Many economists now expect 30-year fixed rate mortgages in the United States to drop to as low as 3.5 percent over the next six months.
This could easily cause the biggest surge in refinancing of mortgages the United States has ever seen and will surely have a major positive impact on the U.S. housing market in the second half of 2009.
3. Falling oil prices
A strong positive factor for the worldwide economy heading into 2009 is the relatively low price of oil. As of this writing, the price per barrel of oil was about $40, down from $147 per barrel in July of this year.
As a result, U.S. gasoline prices averaged only $1.65 in early December after reaching a high of $4.11 this past summer. This is an extremely important factor for the future of the worldwide economy since for every one cent of decline in gasoline prices, an annualized savings of $1 billion is realized!
Having the exact opposite effect of rising oil prices, low oil prices have historically set the stage for a rebound in the worldwide economy.
With the average price per barrel of oil expected to decline by over 30 percent in 2009 as compared to 2008, the price of oil will transition from being a 'headwind' on the fortunes of the 2008 worldwide economy to a 'tailwind' next year.
A comprehensive suite of data from Embedded.com's 2008 user survey, this report unearths some surprises among embedded developers: a decline in interest in embedded Linux, a reticence to use source-code analysis tools, and significant increases in the delays in development projects.
A joint project of EE Times, Piper-Jaffray, and Sandia National Laboratories' FPGA Mission Assurance Center, this report updates the 2006 survey by showing that the shift from wide-scale ASIC use to production FPGAs has already occurred. This year's report includes expanded sections for analog components and military-aerospace applications.
A comprehensive overview of venture investments in the electronics industry made during calendar year 2007. This study focuses on areas such as "cleantech" investment, fabless semiconductor investment, and wireless end markets such as WiMax. Available as a PDF report, and as a combined report and Excel spreadsheet.
Waiting for the Mobile Payments Global Infrastructure - Near-Field Communications holds the promise of being the underlying technology for all mobile payment schemes. But NFC has faced a long gestation, driven by slow development of application software and a variety of chip-set support schemes. This report provides a careful look at when NFC and contactless payments from a handset can experience the growth rates promised for the last five years.
The uncertain extent of primary telecom transport cannibalization of form factors turns on the hinges of global deployments. Current trends suggest a rapid transition in the North American market from full-sized ATCA to uTCA and its smaller cousins, like PicoTCA. If carriers in Asia and Europe follow this trend to smaller, more power-efficient central offices and POPs, overall ATCA shipments may be dominated by uTCA well before 2015. If traditional rack-mount sizes dominate in overseas markets, full-sized ATCA could carve out its own portion of the market of a size approaching several billion dollars per year by 2015. In any event, the drive toward standardization will favor the growth of an overall ATCA/uTCA market to a point exceeding $5 billion per year by 2012.
In 2007, the IEEE 802.3 working group for Ethernet took a revolutionary step and approved two separate paths beyond 10 Gbit/sec speeds: one standard is for 40-Gbit/sec Ethernet channels, the other for 100-Gbit/sec channels. Today, the choice of two speeds could accelerate design for those who were hesitant at moving directly to 100 Gbits/sec, or it could slow implementation of practical prototypes by diluting efforts to develop a faster Ethernet. Early indications suggest the first alternative remains the most likely, and this implies that a 40-Gbit/sec market will be first to emerge.
The semiconductor industry has dominated electronics for four decades using silicon and other elements doped with inorganic materials. A new generation of technology aims to use organic polymers to produce light emitting diodes (LEDs) and transistors that use less power, are lighter and more flexible and can be made more cheaply using ink jet printing techniques and low cost materials.
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