EMS@C-LEVEL · 18 Nov 2023 · 9m
Robin Ng, CEO of ASMPT, discusses the company's strategy for navigating disruptions in the semiconductor and SMT industries through close customer engagement and a unified process-oriented culture for its 11,000+ employees. He explains how the convergence of automotive electrification and advanced packaging drives demand for ASMPT's equipment, leveraging synergies between high-precision SEMI tools and high-speed SMT pick-and-place machines. Ng highlights the company's strong position in the AI-driven market, specifically noting that thermal compression tools (TCP) are currently in a 'sweet spot' due to the specific requirements of AI chip packaging.
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Hosts Dave Jones and Chris Gammell discuss the rising cost of gold-plated connectors due to commodity prices, the shift of semiconductor packaging to low-cost regions like China and Malaysia, and the potential for robotics in PCB assembly. They also cover industry consolidation at UBM, the discontinuation of print magazines like EE Times, and provide technical advice on using FPGAs and selecting op-amps for ultrasonic applications.
Hosts Ben Bajarin and Jay Goldberg analyze recent earnings from TSMC, ASML, and AEHR, discussing how AI-driven demand is reshaping semiconductor manufacturing. They detail TSMC's increased CapEx for advanced packaging, ASML's expansion of High NA EUV capacity, and AEHR's role in critical burn-in testing for complex chiplets. The hosts also examine market sentiment, noting investor rotation away from semiconductors despite strong fundamentals, and debate the long-term ROI of massive AI infrastructure investments by hyper-scalers and neoclouds.
AMD CTO Mark Papermaster discusses the company's transition to 7nm Zen architecture, chiplet-based designs like the Threadripper 3990X, and the integration of specialized accelerators for AI workloads. Imagination Technologies CEO Ron Black explains the company's strategic pivot toward automotive graphics, ray tracing, and RISC-V cores, highlighting the resumption of its partnership with Apple. EE Times editors analyze 2020 investment trends, emphasizing that data generation from apps is driving semiconductor growth, with specific focus on memory, RF front-ends, and power infrastructure in developing economies.
Ramiro Montes de Oca, CEO and founder of aThing.io, explains his company's 'motionless electronics'—modular, penny-sized components that connect via phone-style connectors without soldering. He discusses the technical architecture of these modules, the emerging chiplet industry standard led by the Chiplet Alliance, and the business challenges of scaling hardware manufacturing during global supply chain disruptions. Montes de Oca also shares insights from exhibiting at CES and the importance of design-for-manufacturing for early-stage founders.
Simi Sherman and Chaim Eisenberg, founders of the semiconductor data analytics firm Chips and Wafers, explain how they aggregate granular, timely data to help investors predict company performance and industry trends. They discuss specific methodologies, such as tracking memory IC exports from Korea to Taiwan to model TSMC's CoWoS capacity, and using Besi's Malaysia-to-China shipments to forecast quarterly misses. The conversation also covers the industry's shift from monolithic SoCs to disaggregated chiplets, highlighting the increasing complexity and cost of ABF substrates and the rising importance of backend packaging.
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