Visionary Seminar: Semiconductors: an industry in transition in a world of change

We are happy to invite you to our top Visionary Seminar to celebrate the 25 years of IMEC,organised by Leuven.Inc and IMEC

With eminent speakers of the EC (Dirk Beernaert), SEMI Europe (Carlos Lee), Biocartis (Rudi Pauwels), Siemens AG (Jean-Paul Peers) and IMEC (Hugo De Man, Rudy Lauwereins, Jo De Boeck, Jef Poortmans)

The world of the 21st century is confronted with grand challenges such as the urgent need for renewable energy sources, for low energy and smart mobility and affordable health and care services. This will require new semiconductor based solutions both in the ICT and energy worlds. Photovoltaics (PV) is rapidly becoming the fastest growing semiconductor industry. The smart grid will require innovations in power electronics and distributed computing. The evolution towards a smart environment runs at full speed. We are evolving from a PC-centric to cheap person-centric nomadic computing and communication interfacing with all living and non-living smart objects in the users' ambient. There's lot to be expected in healthcare advances (tele-healthcare new medicines .) to cope with the aging society.

At the same time, the semiconductor industry is going through some major changes. Further scaling of chip technology to realize teraflop and terabit compute and storage capabilities is only possible by extremely innovative technologies. The design of these complex chips has never been so challenging. New business models will emerge to cope with the soaring chip process technology development and manufacturing cost as well as with the exponentially increasing chip design costs.

All of this is leading to deep changes in the nature of the semiconductor industry and more in particular to the emergence of a globalised eco-system of research consortia, silicon foundries, fabless and fablite industries.

Practical aspects
Date: Thursday October 1,2009 (12h30-19h00)
Location: IMEC auditorium, Kapeldreef 75,3001 Leuven (Heverlee)

Program
- 13h30: Welcome
- 14h00: Introduction: Semiconductors: an industry in transition in a world of change - Hugo De Man, Em.Prof. K.U.Leuven, Senior Fellow IMEC
- 14h30: From 'Counting my sheep' to 'Recording and Storing my Life': a (r)evolution in computation and data storage - Rudy Lauwereins, Vice-president Smart Systems Technology Office at IMEC
- 15h00: Future needs and prospects in Healthcare - Micro&Nanotechnologies as enablers to build novel, cost-effective medical solutions - Rudi Pauwels, Co-founder and Chairman Biocartis
- 15h30: See me, feel me, touch me, heal me...Wireless sensor nodes making your life smart and easy - Jo De Boeck, Director Smart Systems and Energy Technology&Director Holst Centre IMEC
- 16h00: Coffee Break
- 16h30: From Powerelectronics to Power Solutions - Jean-Paul Peers, Vice President Energy Policy, Siemens AG
- 17h00: The role of Photovoltaics in the changing global landscape - Jef Poortmans, Program Director Solar Cell Research at IMEC
- 17h30: A supportive industrial policy, a prerequisite for a competitive European industry - Carlos Lee, Sr. Manager, Brussels Office, SEMI Europe
- 18h00: What is EC's take on this changing industry? - Dirk Beernaert, Head of Unit G1 - Nano-electronics EC
- 18h30: Closing remarks - Hugo De Man, Em.Prof. K.U.Leuven, Senior Fellow IMEC
- 18h45: Drink and snacks

Language:

The interventions will be held in English.

For detailed information on the speakers, please click here
For the abstracts, please click here

Content of the program
We'll discuss how this is leading to the end of the monoprocessor and the beginning of the multicore and FPGA (field programmable gate array) era with a very deep impact on software programming paradigms both for general purpose and embedded systems.

At the same time, the world of the 21st century is confronted with grand challenges such as the urgent need for renewable energy sources, for low energy and smart mobility and affordable health and care services. This will require new semiconductor based solutions both in the ICT and energy worlds.

We'll discuss how solar energy will play a major role in this. Photovoltaics (PV) is rapidly becoming the fastest growing semiconductor industry consuming half of the world's silicon production today. Massive PV deployment and other renewable energy sources will also change the nature of power distribution. And the so-called smart grid, which will amongst others make sure that the available renewables will be used in an efficient way, will require enormous developments in power electronics and distributed teraflop computing for control and load balancing.

Society's expectation of ICT is also changing, as it evolves from PC-centric to cheap person-centric nomadic computing and communication interfacing with all living and non-living smart objects in the users' ambient.

It will be discussed how all of this will not only require 'More Moore' (or scaling) but also a plethora of new multi-disciplinary micro- and nanosystem technologies also called 'More than Moore (MTM)' technologies to create smart man-object and object-object interfaces.

Particular attention will be given to the impact of More Moore and More Than Moore technologies on the medical world and on the production of affordable new medicines.

All of this is leading to deep changes in the nature of the semiconductor industry and more in particular to the emergence of a globalised eco-system of research consortia, silicon foundries, fabless and fablite industries.

Finally, attention will be paid to the challenges and opportunities that these changes will present to the European semiconductor industry both from the perspective of the SEMI organization and of the European Commission.