Keynote Talk
Keynote Address
"Smart Management of ASIC Requirements and Technology (SMART)",
Christine King, President & CEO, AMI Semiconductor
Complex issues such as time-to-market, productivity, cost, performance and power continue to challenge the semiconductor industry. Today the focus is on finding the best overall solution to fit individual applications and to meet specific market needs. Many applications require and benefit from the highly advanced system-on-a-chip designs enabled by the unprecedented silicon potential of ever-shrinking technologies. For example, high-performance graphics processors in computers and game systems have evolved to extreme examples of integration, but are very specific to a given architecture. Routers and datapath systems, on the other hand, must be configurable to different I/O and network requirements and are benefiting from a combination of medium-density ASICs, standard products and FPGAs where the same "leading-edge" technology is not essential. Today's engineers are striving to balance the tradeoffs of these two approaches to find the smartest overall solution. What will the impact of this SMART mind set be on the semiconductor industry in the year 2002 and beyond?
Christine King was named president and chief executive officer of AMI Semiconductor (AMIS) on Sept. 10, 2001, becoming the first woman CEO of a semiconductor company.
Prior to joining AMIS, King spent 23 years at IBM where she was most recently vice president of Semiconductor Products for IBM Microelectronics, a multi-billion dollar business. Her extensive experience at IBM includes launching IBM's ASIC business in 1993 and growing it to be the number one ASIC business in the world with $1.7 billion in revenue, as reported by Gartner Dataquest. She also launched IBM's networking business in 1998.