Halla on what the semiconductor industry is doing for you

MUNICH, GERMANY. Who cares about semiconductors? Maybe only the trade press and its readers, suggested Brian L. Halla, chairman and CEO of National Semiconductor, at a press conference today on the eve of Electronica. Politicians don’t seem to care, he said, recounting a visit to Washington with Intel chairman Craig R. Barrett on behalf of the SIA. He said the two pushed for expansion of the H-1B visa program and for more support for research, including full funding of the America Competes act, mostly to no avail. The semiconductor industry ranks fifth or sixth, he said he was told by Henry M. Paulson, on Washington’s list of priorities.

The industry doesn’t seem to get much respect from the stock markets, either, Halla said, noting that before the recent sub-prime debacle price-earnings ratios for chip companies were in the low teens—not in the 30 to 50 range common in earlier boom times.

“Why has the bloom gone off the lily?” he asked. After all, he said, the semiconductor industry is seminal to almost every innovation today, with semiconductors at the heart of nearly every system and product and with the industry operating at nanometer geometries, pushing atoms around.

He invited his audience to think about semiconductors the way neighbors do. They all have cell phones, PCs, and a host of consumer-electronics gadgets and, he said, might well ask the industry what it has done for them lately.

To address the emerging ennui, he called for a semiconductor sea change, in which the industry addresses “quality of life megatrends” in renewable energy, healthcare, and security. Electronics is moving beyond the age in which it’s almost completely driven by IT.

He called analog the enabler of the sea change and noted that Moore’s Law didn’t say anything about power efficiency. For some computers and workstations, he said facetiously, the fans are manufactured by Boeing. He said that many chores needn’t be addressed by processing with 0s and 1s. Instead, he called for processing real-world signals in the real, analog, world.

He cited a history of semiconductor industry innovations, including DRAM for mainframes, processors for PCs, enabling technology for the Internet, and chips for consumer-electronics gadgets. Each of these peaked and declined, he said, to be replaced by the next wave of innovation. In anticipation of the decline of the consumer electronics cycle, he said, he is anticipating that the next cycle will be for devices that serve renewable-energy, electric-vehicle, and battery-management applications.

As an example of emerging semiconductor capabilities and applications, he touted National Semiconductor’s PowerWise technologies, which, he said, perform “analog-to-information” conversion in which entire processing chains move to the analog domain. He cited an analog far-field noise suppression circuit that uses 10% of the power that a DSP-based approach would offer.

He also cited the company’s SolarMagic technology, which can dramatically increase the efficiency of solar panel deployments in which some panels are subjected to periods of shade as the sun moves across the sky. SolarMagic, he said, can compensate for the degradation in power output that can occur when panels fully exposed to sunlight are interconnected with panels that are fully or partially shaded.

He cited additional areas that National is pursuing, including electric vehicles (he sees instant recharging as within reach) and health care (for which “distributed medicine” can help to cut costs).

He noted in response to a question that he doesn’t talk to Intel’s Barrett much about analog processing, and National’s approach is far different from Intel’s efforts to turn everything into a digital computational problem. Halla did say that he thinks it’s time to stop just throwing more gates at problems.

He was asked who he thought would make a good CTO of America, a position that President Elect Obama said he would establish. Halla said that neither Carly Fiorina nor Meg Whitman would be good choices (although they would certainly indicate bipartisanship on the part of Obama), saying the best choice would come from the semiconductor industry.

As for what he would like to see from government, he advocated an avoidance of isolationism. “We need to be able to design anywhere in the world and ship anywhere in the world,” he said.