4th Industrial Revolution and Foundry: Challenges and Opportunities

Semiconductor has been the key enabler in the advancement of electronics for the past 50 years. With the coming of 4th industrial revolution, semiconductor will continue to play an even greater role as we invite a wide variety of new applications into our lives, including smart cars, smart factories, artificial intelligence, data centers, robots, etc. Such importance of semiconductor is attributed to its unique ability to copy and create everything human beings imagine. In this paper, the roles of foundry in the 4th industrial revolution, as the entity to turn ideas into reality along with electronic design automation (EDA), intellectual property (IP) vendor, and outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT) companies, as well as the need for global open innovation to overcome imminent challenges will be discussed.