Important financial and market forces are creating unprecedented growth and dynamism in the semiconductor industry. The present dynamics include:
- A worldwide chip shortage impacting industries large and small.
- The unprecedented flow of semiconductor-interested public and private capital coupled with record M&A transactions and offers.
- The acceleration of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architectures, from smaller devices to larger servers and systems and from device and systems vendor use to customer use.
- Related to the growth of RISC, contract semiconductor manufacturing (i.e., foundry services) is booming, with take-up spanning semiconductor, consumer/business electronics and cloud platform services vendors.
- The growth of specialized workload-tuned semiconductor solutions — e.g., ASICs, system on a chip (SoC) — taking share from general-purpose processors.