The semiconductor industry lives and dies by a simple creed: smaller, faster and cheaper. The benefit of being tiny is pretty simple: finer lines mean more transistors can be packed onto the same semiconductor device. The more transistors on a semiconductor/chip, the faster it can do its work.
The Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), representing the U.S. leadership in semiconductor manufacturing, design, and research announced in early August 2016, that worldwide sales of semiconductors reached $79.1 billion during the second quarter of 2016. This is an increase of 1.0 percent over the previous quarter and a decrease of 5.8 percent compared to the second quarter of 2015. “Global semiconductor sales increased slightly from Q1 to Q2 but remain behind the pace from last year, due largely to global economic uncertainty and sluggish demand,” said John Neuffer, president and CEO, Semiconductor Industry Association.
Rapid technological innovation will drive growth in the semiconductor industry. As more and more cutting-edge devices (such as smartphones, tablets, electric cars, medical devices, IoT and wearable devices) emerge, they will constantly expand the number of semiconductor device we use every day and drive the innovation in IC design jobs and the number of semiconductor sales and marketing jobs. The advance of digitisation and IoT will further increase demand for semiconductor products. Taken together, these factors should drive solid growth for the global semiconductor market over the next five years.
PWC’s report on ‘The Internet of Things: The next growth engine for the semiconductor industry’, studied global semiconductor trends and powerful drivers behind the forces affecting the global semiconductor industry. The report offered several key findings that predict that technological progress will maintain its high pace and that the scaling down of semiconductor feature sizes will continue.
Key findings include:
- Industrial and automotive markets will both drive significant growth in demand for semiconductors and thus fab investment and semiconductor process engineering jobs.
- Trend towards integrating more semiconductor features on a single chip (SoC) will continue.
- The sensor sector’s remarkable growth rate is being driven by numerous innovations in sensor technology and strong demand generated by the emerging concept of the Internet of Things (IoT).
- Accelerating sales of tablets continue to drive the data processing application market. However, the significant growth of ultramobile devices strongly suggests that these will gradually displace tablets as the leader, and become the powerful driver for data processing application markets in the future.
“These drivers in both new semiconductor processes and expanding applications within IOT, Automotive, Computing and Data centres will drive a mix of careers and semiconductor job opportunities to a new breed of engineers.” says David Collins, Manager. “With the likes of Intel generating in excess of $50Bn and Samsung £38Bn these types of companies will need both technologist but commercial biased engineers who can partner with large OEM’s to deliver the next generation of household products”.
Redline Group is a specialist Contract & Permanent recruitment consultancy sourcing and selecting professional & qualified Management, Technical and Sales staff for the European technology market. Redline provide recruitment, retention and management advice and expertise to assist technology companies in identifying and developing the best talent for their organisations.
For further information on Redline Group’s Sales and Marketing Division
click here.