We have a guest contribution from Iulia Morariu, who does marketing for us. Iulia has a bachelor's degree in computer science and a master’s degree in computer networking. She shares her point of view about her experience as an outsourcing engineer for the company.

Outsourcing is the main focus of this post. Since early 1990s outsourcing captured the attention of some of the biggest companies in the world. Growing along with the Internet, outsourcing came as a natural thing for those who seek cheap work force and skilled engineers. According to The International Center for Peace and Development  “It began on a large scale with the migration of manufacturing jobs to lower wage developing countries in the 1960s and 70s, when countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea became major manufacturing hubs for global corporations.” It accelerated in the 1990s when other countries became major destinations for foreign investment in manufacturing for export. XMG Global, an ITC Research and Advisory Company noted that the global outsourcing industry was estimated in 2010 to $425 billion having a growth of 13.9% from 2009’s $374 billion.

Among the first industries that saw the advantages for this was the IT sector. This is now reflected into global IT services spending in excess of $3.5B last year (table 1), much of it outsourced:

According to Gartner's U.S. dollar growth forecast for global IT spending in 2012 has been revised downward from 4.6% in the previous quarter to 3.7%. “Faltering global economic growth, the Eurozone crisis and the impact of Thailand's floods on hard-disc drive production have taken their toll on IT spending”, remarked Richard Gordon, VP of Research for Gartner Inc. 

European engineers are spread all over the world, mostly the ones that continued their studies in a foreign country and then managed to obtain positions in international corporations. “While reliable projections are difficult in a field that is evolving so rapidly, it has been estimated that by 2015, US companies will offshore 3.3 million jobs valued at $135 billion a year”, The International Center for Peace and Development states in its “Employment Trends in the 21st Century” research.

“European firms prefer nearshoring to countries in Eastern Europe such as Romania where wages are only 10% of the level in the West. More than 80% of world's top 2000 companies operate significant outsourcing operations overseas”, says the research report. So why shouldn’t US companies take on the trend to a next level? I am sure they will continue to outsource their business throughout European countries. Gaining not only cheap labor but also an inside view of how the European market evolves. Evolving technology and the hunger for money will spread knowledge in the most remote places on Earth.

Projections from The International Labour Office in Geneva for unemployment from 2011-2016 indicate that there will be a large untapped pool of skilled talent in Europe for the foreseeable future: 

I believe that international companies should invest more in foreign countries, keeping the “wheels spinning” and the money coming. Speaking from my experience as one such engineer – I myself live in Romania -- I can say that it is a life changing opportunity and that there is much more we can learn from each other. When working in an international company you don’t just have the world at your feet (by reducing the distance from 3,000 kilometers to a click away) but also have the chance to interact in a multicultural environment.  

References:
1 – “Employment Trends in the 21st Century”, The International Center for Peace and Development, www.icpd.org
2. – “Global Employment Trends 2012”, The International Labour Office in Geneva, http://www.ilo.org
3. – Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast, http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/it-spending-forecast/

A recent book review by Peter Clarke on this wonderful new book by Bernd Hoefflinger caught my eye, and also reminded me of an old connection I have with Hoefflinger.

Early in the 90's I had the pleasure to collaborate with Hoefflinger, who at that time was the director of the Institute for Microelectronics Stuttgart (IMS CHIPS). I was the CEO of Chip Express then and we worked together to demonstrate that applying Direct-Write-eBeam to a Chip Express wafer could lead to a very effective Gate-Array prototyping scheme and to low volume production of those Gate-Arrays.

It was great pleasure to reconnect and to read "Chip 2020"
I highly recommend this book as it provides an update view of the Semiconductor Industry by a group of known experts in our field.
The book provides a concise review how we got here and what is ahead for us up to the year 2020.

The book presents a now more common view that the scaling that got us here is gone, and that there are concrete red-bricks for dimensional scaling beyond 2020. Primarily:

1. As gate sizes reach ~10nm we would have nominally 6 atoms of impurity in the channel with a commensurate variation that would constrain effective use of the transistor -see Fig. 1.1

2. As lithography tools are already forced to use double exposure/processing it has became unclear if an effective lithography is going to be available to move forward. See the Table 8.3 below, provided by Burn J. Lin of TSMC

Clearly the future cost of lithography eats away at the cost advantage of dimensional scaling.

Hoefflinger presents some options to tackle these challenges as detailed through the book and with respect to specific segments of the industry. The following Fig. 3.1 presents these future technologies:

At MonolithIC 3D we were pleased to see the important role given to 3D IC in the book as shown in the Fig. 3.1 above.

In short I fully agree with Peter Clarke’s statement: "The book offers some far-reaching and fundamental insights" and I highly recommend the book to semiconductor technologists who are looking forward toward the next decade of progress in the field.