TSMC Technology Symposium Preview: Note New Location!

Before I go any further, after years and years of being at the San Jose Convention Center, this year's TSMC Technology Symposium has moved. It will be in the Santa Clara Convention Center. And, while on that topic, Arm TechCon later this year is going in the opposite direction—after many years in Santa Clara it will be in the San Jose Convention Center. So don't go to the wrong places.

If you plan to go and you only take one thing away from this blog post, then make it this: the TSMC Tech Symposium is in Santa Clara, not San Jose. You should be there that day too.

What day would that be?

May 1st in Santa Clara

There are really only two times per year that you can get an idea of what TSMC is doing. What new technologies they will introduce? What fabs they are building? How are processes ramping to volume? Some sneak previews of next-generation process features. In between, TSMC rarely announces anything except its financial results. You won't find most of this information on their website either.

TSMC is such a large part of the fabless ecosystem, and it is right on the cutting edge of new process nodes, that what they do sets the agenda for the whole industry. So if you want to be informed about what the semiconductor industry is doing, what is changing, and what is the timetable, then you need to be at the Tech Symposium. The second event is the Open Innovation Platform Ecosystem Forum (OIP) which this year is 3rd October in Santa Clara.

Agenda

The basic format is the same as previous years. In the morning there will be presentations by senior TSMC executives. In the afternoon, there are deeper technical dives.

The morning agenda is:

• 8.30am onwards: registration and breakfast in the ecosystem pavilion
• 9.30am to 9.40am: Welcome
• 9.40am to 10am: Industry Overview and Corporate Updates
• 10am to 10.30am: Technology Leadership
• break in ecosystem pavilion
• 11.00am to 11.20am: Design Solutions and Enablement
• 11.20am to 11.50am: Manufacturing Excellence
• lunch (in past years this has been in one room, with coffee and dessert in the ecosystem pavilion)

For a couple of years now, TSMC has talked about targeting four verticals: mobile, automotive, IoT, and HPC. This year the afternoon presentations (almost) follow this vertical structure. So the afternoon looks like:

• 1pm to 2pm: Technology for Mobile and HPC
• 2pm to 2.30pm: Advanced Packaging Technology (things like CoWoS, InFO, and wafer-on-wafer)
• break in the ecosystem pavilion
• 3pm to 3.45pm: Technology for IoT
• 3.45pm to 4.30pm: Technology for Automotive
• 4.30pm to 5.30pm: social hour in the ecosystem pavilion
• 5.30 to whenever: stuck in traffic

TSMC don't say in advance who will be giving the presentations, although I have heard that Cliff Hou will be coming. Which is the perfect excuse to plug my book (it's free!) Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry, for which Cliff wrote the foreword. Also worth a read, as a piece of history, is my post TSMC 30 Years Ago Today on a presentation TSMC gave to the finance community when they were just getting started.

Not in Silicon Valley?

The Tech Symposium goes on tour:

• 9th May in Austin
• 16th May in Boston
• 22nd May in Shanghai
• 21st June in Hsinchu
• 24th July in Amsterdam
• 5th September in Herzliya

Then, in the fall, it is OIP. As I said above, it is 3rd October in Silicon Valley. It actually goes to Europe first, and China later:

• 23rd June in Amsterdam
• 30th October in Nanjing

More Information

More details are on the TSMC website. And if you want a challenge, try and find this agenda page yourself. It has the agenda and a link for registration.

And, once again, don't forget it has moved to Santa Clara this year. I'll see you there. I'll be the guy typing furiously since none of us are allowed to photograph the screen, nor record the event, and there are no handouts.

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