IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2022 - 46

Focusing on tertiary services without giving a parallel boost to enabling technologies,
including training highly skilled personnel, can only lead to unsustainable progress.
equipment: the typewriter has been transformed into
a personal computer, the analog camera into a digital
camera, the pinball machine into a game station, the
telephone into a smartphone.
The reason for this success is linked to the exceptional
qualities that semiconductor technology has shown: its
progressive miniaturization capability with a parallel increase
in performance, the extraordinary containment
of the electrical power required for the same function
and, last but not least, the remarkable reduction of costs.
An incessant investment in research and development
has made semiconductors the most refined technology
that man has managed to invent, a technology at the nanoscale
dimension that has allowed the explosion of
portable battery-powered applications with enormous
data processing and connectivity capabilities. After the
breakthrough in the automotive market and electric
cars, electronics is preparing to permeate more and
more the biomedical, health and wellness fields. Chips
implanted in the human body will allow recovery from
accidents and serious neurological diseases such as epilepsy,
Alzheimer's and Parkinson's [37]. In the future, nanoelectronics
will cover increasingly broad areas, many
of which are still to be explored. For these reasons there
will be a continuously increasing need for specialized personnel
who are already very scarce and sought after.
According to the Semiconductor Research Corporation,
five fundamental breakthroughs will define
the next decade of semiconductors and information
and communication technologies [38]: 1) Implementing
smarter world-machine interfaces that can sense,
perceive, and reason, to pursue analog-to-information
compression with a practical ratio of 105:1 analogous
to the human brain; 2) Designing radically new memory
and storage solutions with new storage systems and
technologies with >100× storage density capability;
3) Addressing the imbalance of communication capacity
vs. data-generation rates enabling data transmission
of 100-1000 zettabyte/year at the peak rate of 1Tbps;
4) Addressing emerging security challenges in highly interconnected
trustworthy AI systems, secure hardware
platforms, and emerging postquantum and distributed
cryptographic algorithms; 5) New computing paradigms
are needed demonstrating dramatic >1,000,000◊ improvement
to meet ever-rising energy demand for computing
versus global energy production.
Glenn O'Donnell, research director at analyst firm
Forrester, said there is a shortage of people in Silicon
46
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
Valley with the skills required to design high end-processors.
" Despite its name, Silicon Valley now employs relatively
few real silicon engineers. Silicon Valley put so
much emphasis on software over the past few decades
that hardware engineering was seen as a bit of an anachronism.
It became uncool to do hardware " [39].
5. Promoting Electronics to Young People
In a very general view, electronic engineering transforms
basic research technologies into reliable new
devices and products that can improve human life and
experiences. There will be little advancement of truly
innovative applications and services if we stop at the
electronics available today [38]. And today's applications
could not exist with the electronics of just 5 years
ago.
In the near future, new semiconductor devices,
new integrated circuits and new electronic systems will
be needed to create 5G/6G networks, smart cities and
smart industries, IoT, self-driving cars, artificial intelligence,
telesurgery, quantum computers or other innovations
yet to be invented. Digitalization doesn't just focus
on data management as a core skill. Data is obviously a
strategic asset, but a fully integrated digital value chain
requires hardware infrastructures that have to be often
invented or optimized for the purpose7. Those improvements
are mainly managed by electronic engineers.
Specifically, the semiconductor industry needs several
specialized professional profiles including: Process Engineer,
Design Engineer, Design Verification Engineer, Device
Engineer, Packaging Engineer, Application Engineer, Field
Application Engineer, System Engineer, Test Engineer,
Validation Engineer, Technology Engineer, Technical Sales
Engineer, Software and CAD Engineer, Product Marketing
Engineer, Information Technology Engineer, Facilities Engineer,
Maintenance Engineer, Quality Engineer, Reliability
Engineer. Many of these specializations require almost
exclusively a master's degree in electronic engineering.
A subset of these jobs can be found in many other hightech
companies, not primarily focused on electronics,
from aerospace to telecommunications and robotics, from
7For example, for many companies, the inability to locate a critical component
in the warehouse can compromise an entire assembly cycle.
Today, technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification) tags
use an attachable tag containing a microchip that stores the unique
identification (ID) of each object. Improvements in this technology
made it possible to write the RFID memory chip at any time, other than
read only it, and allowed the identification of a large number of tags
simultaneously with a reading range of several meters. Wider and more
interesting applications are enabled by addressing the miniaturization
of antenna, sensors, battery, including power harvesting and data encryption
capabilities.
THIRD QUARTER 2022
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q3 2022

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