Will offshoring move U.S. chip industry to 'designless' model?

By David Bursky, Electronics Supply & Manufacturing
09/11/2006 8:00 AM EST

SUNNYVALE, Calif. — The offshoring of U.S. chip design jobs, a growing concern among American engineers, is beginning to show up on the agendas of technical conferences.

A panel at next week's IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) will tackle the issue in a session on Tuesday (Sept. 12) entitled, "Fabless to Designless: How Do We Manage Globalization Challenges?"

Moderated by Sudhir Aggarwal, founder of Adonics Technology, a system-on-chip design consultancy (Fremont, Calif.), the panel will address the challenges of growing design complexity and costs. Such trends, according to Aggarwal, are forcing IC companies to use more outside intellectual property. That means more offshoring of design projects to low-wage countries like India.

An emerging issue is whether increased offshoring will hasten the rise of a "designless" business model for the U.S. semiconductor industry. Panelists from around the world are expected to address that issue from a global perspective.

The panelists are: Rob Aitken, a fellow at ARM Ltd.; Paul Bromley, director of corporate strategic planning at STMicroelectronics; Mojy Chain, vice president of technology development at Altera Corp.; Bob Payne, CTO of LSI Logic Corp.; Shih-Wei Sun, senior vice president of Central R&D at United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC); and Woodward Yang, a Harvard University engineering professor.

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