Artificial intelligence, quantum energy, and large-scale biological manufacturing of human organs are slowing down the progress of Moore's law.

From 9 to 10 July, at the SEMICON West 2019 conference in San Francisco, the keynote speaker and the speaker of the AI Design Forum spoke about the imminent challenges and explosive market opportunities. ICON West has once again proved its appeal, pointing the way for electronic innovation in the next few years.

Dave Anderson, president of SEMI Americas, said: "The current business environment requires the industry to pay attention to issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. Especially because we are approaching a once-in-a-lifetime turning point, which could bring about $10 trillion in business opportunities.

Segway's market forecast highlights this point: the supply chain of microelectronics products is about to usher in what may be the oldest era of electronic products.

Anderson adds that "inflection points like this are rare, but not unprecedented." He pointed out that 2007 was the turning point of the growth curve driven by new technology, which pushed semiconductor sales to a record high last year.

SEMICON focuses on the future, and industry leaders point out that chip, tool and material manufacturers should look beyond their suppliers and customers in developing strategic partnerships. One of them is Dr. Cliff Young, a data scientist with the Google Brain Team, who invited semiconductor and equipment companies to explore collaborative chip design with Google.

The recently established Quantum Economic Development Consortium and its 50 members, including Boeing, Google and IBM, organized road mapping to pursue American leadership in the rapidly rising global quantum computing industry. IBM's Jeff Welser demonstrates an IBM Q computer model based on decades of progress in the semiconductor industry. Quantum computing power can make an amazing leap in automotive, medical, financial and energy fields. Today, anyone can try out future quantum computing capabilities by connecting IBM's 16-bit quantum computers online.

Dr. Aart de Geus, chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, said that if software and other programming were open source, development would be faster. He recommends an open source model that allows semiconductor and equipment companies to work together in cloud computing to accelerate chip development.

Nate Baxter, general manager of TEL Development and Production Group, advocates sharing big data with competitors in pre-competitive spaces to ensure data quality, improve measurement and solve problems faster. The key is security. "Yes, we can share data while protecting it," he said. "We soon saw opportunities we didn't know before."

Gary Dickerson, president and CEO of Applied Materials, said that by embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into chips, the speed of processing large data computing will be much faster than that of humans, thus promoting the long-term significant growth of the industry.

If there is enough electricity. In the absence of visibility, AI machines are already processing large amounts of data and consuming energy in the process. With the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence applications, the current power grid will face unprecedented pressure. Dickerson adds that the speed of innovation, social acceptance and security will guide how AI can be better and faster adopted. However, a potential obstacle will follow. In terms of dramatically reducing the power consumption of power-consuming AI chips, power limitations may be "very high", and "if we do not promote innovation, it will hinder the application of AI".

Four of the five members of a group of venture capitalists have accepted that our Moore's law no longer exists. The good news is that the average age of first mobile phone use is 10 years old, and more than 40% of the world's population is under 25 years old. This will have considerable market influence. With the help of 5G, it will be connected to trillions of devices. AMD CEO Lisa Su pointed out that "a lot of innovation has yet to come", including advances in microarchitecture, stacking of chips and moulds, and heterogeneous platforms.

Nothing is more innovative than mass regeneration of human organs. Inventor Dean Kamen has proposed a well-funded plan to biologically treat human viscera, but warns that there are two challenges that must be tackled: size and talent.

Kamen said in his keynote speech: "I came to Samkonwest to seek the help of high-tech companies to help us get artificial organs out of the lab and accelerate the pace of mass production and wide distribution." The problem is that "basic science already exists, but researchers can't scale it up like Silicon Valley."

Skilled workers in the microelectronics industry will realize Kamen's dream, and these workers will realize their aspirations. At that time, SEMI approved Kamen's first global project to create a joint initiative to encourage young people around the world to pursue engineering careers.

"Together, we can better provide future generations with a path to success," said Anderson of SEMI.