Inside Semiconductor Industry: The Challenges and Opportunities it Faces

The development of semiconductors was a breakthrough for mankind treading towards the modern technology and digitalization. The functioning of all the devices that play a vital role in a man’s day is facilitated by semiconductors. Such level of significance provides the Semiconductor Industry with innumerable opportunities and its accompanying challenges.

The increasing complexity of technology in the current and upcoming decade has given a rise to new challenges as well as opportunities in the Semiconductor Industry. Therefore opportunities and challenges both walk side by side. The same can be understood from the following.

Big Data

While every tasks and function that used to be tangible are turning digital these days, such a transition requires a lot of storage capabilities. The growing amount of information and data requires the Big Data industry to increase memory capacity while reducing the space that the storage units require. This calls for innovation in the Semiconductor Industry to cope up with such needs.

Energy

Solar, the most common and widely used renewable energy relies heavily on semiconductors on its harnessing. Staring all the way from the panels to the batteries, semiconductors show their presence everywhere. The increasing application of solar power is increasing demands for such semiconductors and matching the demand with supply is a great opportunity yet a challenge for resources.

Lighting technology

Lighting used to be a very expensive affair in general households, with conventional tube lights have a large share in the energy consumption. This changed when LED lights come into play, and what made these LED lights function was nothing other than our semiconductors.

The laser is a very underdeveloped and under treaded field currently. Present technological advancements have a high involvement of laser especially in production & other mechanical automation and robotics. The laser also has much more potential in many other fields which cannot be achieved unless there is supporting technology to power it.

Micro/Nanotechnology

The dogma of getting everything to fit in your pockets has spread in people’s minds like wildfire. As the size of the chips has been continually decreasing in nanometers. Getting such miniscule tools to perform optimally remains a big challenge. With lesser size, the durability also decreases while room for error increases. Leakage becomes very common, hence causing dissipation of power. This remains a major challenge before we can shift to the much advanced and convenient technologies.

Further, as engineers favor IT over electronics and hardware. Finding the correct intellectual manpower for this ever growing industry remains one of the challenges.

A recent research done by Stanford engineers concluded that two semiconductors namely hafnium diselenide and zirconium diselenide have matched and even exceeded silicon in certain desirable traits but before these can replace the legendary silicon, a lot of research and improvement needs to take place.

As innovation in technology persists we need to shift a large part of our focus on Research & Development to jump all the hurdles that come on the way to success. Doing so will also help attract the required intellects towards the Semiconductor Industry.