The Coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, we could say quite far. Although the worst is over in Europe, the virus continues to hit the American continent and Africa, which after months of contagion is going to have an impact on the semiconductor industry. How does this affect chip making, how does it affect people and the industry? Will there be a shortage, will prices rise or will we stay the same?
The virus has stopped an entire technology industry such as that involving semiconductors. For two months, no NAND Flash chips , CPUs or GPUs have been manufactured, not a single wafer came from Taiwan, Korea, or the United States, and now that the situation is recovering normally and its reading is really complicated, especially by sprouts.
The increase in telework, its impact and security measures
If there is something interesting that confinements have shown, it is that teleworking has meant a performance leap for the vast majority of workers in terms of chip creation and design. Working at home has allowed a disconnection from the work environment that has apparently paid off with a series of improvements in various fields of semiconductors, especially in the automotive.
Companies like NVIDIA or AMD have taken a leap forward in terms of AI for trucks, where it has been estimated that the contagion figures would be much lower if the work of transporting the goods could have been done by robots with artificial intelligence. At the same time, it is ensured that many entrepreneurs, when forced to change their business due to movement restrictions, have obtained a new business perspective where not only is it maintained, but now it generates more benefits.
This is very productive for the industry, since a lot of SoC will be needed for 5G and IoT, complete hardware changes will be generated to cover new needs and new infrastructures, both at home and in companies.
The only problem is the stop that FinFET represents despite the COVID-19
Although we talked a little more than a week and a half ago about the fact that FinFET-based transistors have come to an end. The industry is in a really difficult position, as job prospects are going to continue to change and innovation is going to have to be higher if they want to pass bills on new products.
The problem is no longer Moore’s Law, but the Dennard scale . Companies are prepared to bear the costs of new masks and lithographic processes for the most immediate future, where the most powerful and leading companies will take over the first wave and the rest will tow behind time or will directly opt for more mature and cheap.
What companies are not prepared for is not to obtain energy gains by reducing nanometers, which will imply that in the development of mechanisms to solve these effects it takes a long time and represents a break in the industry for some years, by far that foundries keep dropping nanometers.
The greater performance and creativity of people working from home, as well as the foreseeable mergers of companies in the sector to generate larger companies can slow everything down because of COVID-19.
It is a found dilemma, where people can solve bigger problems, but instead, an outbreak can paralyze the purchase / sale or merger between certain companies that are seeing how the COVID-19 pandemic depletes their benefits and joining is the best solution.
Therefore, investment will grow, demand will rise, but the industry is awaiting outbreaks or overcoming the first wave to get going and overcome the following challenges, which only makes everything lag depending on the part of the world where we let’s find.