Eastern Europe Semiconductor Technology, Gala Dinner Keynote Presentation

Abstract

Emerging from isolation in forced economic independence, the semiconductor industries in the Eastern block are seen as having recently gone through three decades of government-backed growth followed by economic collapse (1981-1990), rough transition to the market economy (1991-2000), and stabilization to a new equilibrium within the globalization trend (2001 to 2010). Concurrently, the Western block had its growths, enthusiasms, delusions and corrections. The dynamics of these evolutions will be illustrated with landmark achievements associated with advancing on corresponding “Moore’s Law” curves.
At the world level, relatively longer times are observed from invention to application, as the complexity of the new processes and systems increases. It has taken 13 years for the CMOS IC invention to be used in primitive microprocessors (20 for more practical ones), versus only 5 for the bipolar IC invention to find its place in space guidance computers. This observation is important when projecting the application of nanotechnologies to VLSI electronics.
The remainder of the discussion will analyze what is expected to happen in the East in the following years. Learning from the observed unpredictability of the semiconductor industry, the speaker will make cautious predictions, still insisting on the very-high-technology commodity characteristic of digital VLSI electronics. Correspondingly, VLSI products will be profitably manufactured in foundries having price tags in the range of $10B. However, the design, modeling/simulation, and testing of such products will remain realistic everywhere. Among other areas of realistic opportunities, the speaker will suggest analog and mixed-signal ICs, power switches and photovoltaics, TCAD, and nanotechnology, each commented separately. For the latter, reduction to practice appears to be the most critical expectation. The globalization-related unemployment will be commented briefly based on statistical distribution of “skills” in population.
__________
Constantin Bulucea was born in Romania, where he received the titles of inginer and doctor-inginer from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest in 1962 and 1974, respectively.
His professional career spans 50 years, equally split across the Romanian and US semiconductor histories. In Romania, he was the scientific director and director of the R&D Institute for Electronic Components (ICCE) between 1974 and 1986, with assignments of national importance, such as the introduction of silicon transistor technology and the development of the process technology for the Microelectronica MOS/VLSI plant. From that period, his personal legacy includes the creation of the Annual Conference for Semiconductors (CAS), now an international IEEE event, a graduate course and book on Linear Integrated Circuits and reference papers on surface breakdown and hot-carrier injection in silicon, originally communicated at IEDM and later published in the IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices and Solid-State Electronics.
In the US, he remained on the technical side of the semiconductors business, so enjoying the last years of Silicon Valley’s “Happy Scaling”. In particular, at National Semiconductor, he was the architect of company’s 0.25, 0.18, and 0.13 m CMOS processes for analog and mixed-signal applications. Before that, he brought to completion Siliconix's device/process architecture for the next generation of trench power DMOS transistors, which became an industry standard in the following years. He has published over 50 technical articles in international journals and holds 60 US patents.
Dr. Bulucea is an IEEE Fellow and an Honorary Member of the Romanian Academy. In 2011, he became a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff of Texas Instruments (TI), as the result of National Semiconductor’s acquisition. He retired from TI last year, on his 72nd birthday.