New-Tech Europe Magazine | July 2019 | Digital Edition

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likely to be very conservative with their spending budgets for next year given the poor semiconductor market expected in 2019. IC Insights believes that Micron’s attitude toward next year’s capital spending outlook will be representative of the industry in general. In its most recent conference call, Micron stated that, “For fiscal 2020, we plan for capex to be meaningfully lower than fiscal 2019.” As shown in Figure 1, the streak of strong ≥45% capital spending growth two years after spending cutbacks ended

in 2015, with capital spending registering a 1% decline. Moreover, only a 4% increase occurred 2016. Although capital spending jumped by 41% in 2017 (four years after the 2012-2013 downturn in spending), IC Insights believes that the relatively muted cyclical behavior of the capex growth rates since 2013, as compared to past cycles, is another indication of a maturing semiconductor industry.

How to get a server rack in your back pocket? Imec, a world-leading research and innovation hub in nanoelectronics

process technology platforms that are being developed by the European research technology organizations and cooperating foundries in the project, and combining it with the application and hardware knowledge from further partners. The TEMPO project will evaluate the current solutions at device,

and digital technologies, presents TEMPO: a unique cross-border collaboration between 19 research and industrial partners, funded by ECSEL Joint Undertaking which supports public-private partnerships in the EU. The

architecture and application level, and build and expand the technology roadmap for European AI hardware platforms. The project will leverage MRAM (imec), FeRAM (Fraunhofer) and RRAM (CEA-Leti) memory to implement both spiking neural network (SNN) and deep neural network (DNN) accelerators for 8 different use cases, ranging from consumer to automotive and medical applications. Emmanuel Sabonnadiere, CEO at CEA-Leti: “It is our aim to sweep technology options, covering emerging memories, and attempt to pair them with contemporary (DNN) and exploratory (SNN) neuromorphic computing paradigms. The process- and design-compatibility of each technology option will be assessed with respect to established integration practices and meet our industrial partner roadmaps and needs to prepare the future market of Edge IA where Europe is well positioned with multiple disruptive technologies.” Prof. Hubert Lakner, Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems (IPMS) and Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Fraunhofer Group Microelectronics: “A key enabler for machine learning and pattern recognition is the capability of the algorithms to browse through large

three-year program aims at developing process technology and hardware platforms leveraging emerging memory technologies for neuromorphic computing for future applications in mobile devices that need complex machine- learning algorithms. It is a one-of-a-kind collaboration effort to enable applications that now need cloud-based server racks, to be executed within battery-powered mobile devices such as cars and smartphones (at the edge of the internet-of-things). Increasingly, edge artificial intelligence and machine- learning algorithms enter our day-to-day products and applications such as smart home assistants with natural- language processing, face-recognition-based security systems or autonomous vehicles. In the coming years, the demand for these increasingly complex computational algorithms will only grow further. At this moment, high- end server parks process the data in the cloud. However, sending data to the cloud costs energy, latency, and is often not preferred for privacy reasons. As such, the ultimate edge artificial intelligence applications require intelligent energy-efficient local processing. TEMPO aims to tackle this challenge by leveraging the

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