BRIAN SANTO: I’m Brian Santo, EE Times Editor in Chief, and you’re listening to EE Times on Air. This is your Briefing for the week ending October 4th .

In this episode we have…

· … Sub-retinal chips! Tracking down intransigent parking malefactors! Voice control! Tiny insta-labs! It was all at the annual MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit in Grenoble last week. We sent not one but two EE Times editors. We’ll hear from them about what they saw in France.

· Also this week, connecting the Internet of things. Long ago when people started planning for the internet of things, one of the requirements was a way to connect all the things that would make up the Internet of Things. Naturally, many proposals sprouted up – perhaps too many. Some relief is here, though. We’ll have a discussion with advocates of Wi-Fi and LoRaWAN on how those two wireless protocols will complement each other.

· We’re also going to focus on a weakness in the semiconductor market that no one else seems to have identified. The memory segment of the semiconductor industry has long been characterized by boom-and-bust cycles – though in recent years, the peaks and troughs have not been very severe. More and more people seem to think that that’s the new normal. But what if it isn’t?

BOLAJI OJO: What is concerning right now, Junko, is, we don’t really know, we don’t really have people in key positions anymore who have actually experienced the wild swings of the market. When you have not experienced it, or when you think that those swings have gone away, then you’re not prepared for how to manage it. This is something every semiconductor manufacturer, every OEM, every distributor, every contract manufacturer, and folks in purchasing and engineering have to be aware of. You need to pay attention to the cycle. It has not gotten away; it is still there.

BRIAN SANTO: That was Bolaji Ojo, global editor in chief of Aspencore Media, the publishing company that includes EE Times. Bolaji has semiconductor forecasting on his mind. We’ll get back to that in a few minutes.

Topping the show this week, a trip to the annual MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit in Grenoble, France. The market for microelectro-mechanical systems – or MEMS – and sensors represents roughly one-tenth of the world semiconductor market. In 2018, that made MEMS and sensors a $46 billion industry. That includes everything from radars and lidars being built into cars to the accelerometers in your smartwatches that count your steps.

At the show, STMicroelectronics said three trends are driving the sensor market: smart mobility, power and energy management, and the Internet of Things. Some of the specific applications include artificial intelligence, digital health, smart cities, and smart transportation.

EE Times editors Nitin Dahad and Anne-Francoise Pele were at the event. Nitin caught up with Francoise Simoens, a strategic program manager at the French research institute Leti. He’s also an organizer of the Summit. Nitin asked him about the high-level trends in sensors and MEMS.

FRANCOISE SIMOENS: We observe a strong convergence between microelectronics and photonics towards smaller and smarter devices. And thanks to three integration techniques like wafer layer or 3D stacking, we see more and more intelligence at the edge, and I would even say that we see more and more artificial intelligence at the edge. So it’s a very, very strong trend that we observe in these times.

BRIAN SANTO: Later, Nitin and Anne-Francoise got together and reviewed what they saw at the Summit.

NITIN DAHAD: So we heard quite a lot about all different kinds of technologies and applications and market forecasts. Do you want to give me a little bit about how the MEMS market is holding up in this what might called a gloomy economy?

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Well, as you know, the MEMS market follows the American sector market. It was a pretty good year last year. But we had a slower growth rate than expected. I attended Yole Developpment’s keynote, and they said that the MEMS market-rich $11.6 billion in 2018 with consumer applications accounting for more than 60% of the total market.

NITIN DAHAD: So what do you think? Are we heading for a good future? What did they have to say?

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Well, it seems like it, since they said that the MEMS market is expected to grow at 8.2 annual rate up to 2024. So I guess so.

NITIN DAHAD: And what’s driving that? I suppose it’s the usual stuff? Or tell me what you think.

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Well, they said the pressure, RF, inertial and emerging MEMS such as micro-speakers and ultrasonic fingerprints should lead the market and be the drivers for their year to come.

NITIN DAHAD: So you attended the MEMS track, and I think you probably want to highlight one or two of those. Maybe you want to talk a little bit about what Bosch Sensertec was talking about?

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Well, actually, at the end of the MEMS track, there was a common idea, like a consensus that sensor fusion coupled with AI and eventually edge computing will create new use cases. And as you said, I was very interested by the keynote of Markus Ulm, CTO of Bosch Sensortec. What I liked about it was that he actually introduced himself as a hardware guy, hobby programmer and said that he was convinced, fully convinced that software is making a difference to our industry.

NITIN DAHAD: So how has that hurt, in what way?

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Well, we know that the situation is to be the MEMS… well, we knew the MEMS flow. One product, one process. Obviously the standardization in MEMS really is still not as advanced as it is in conventional semiconductor processors model environments. But MEMS technology has developed very much in recent years. And Ulm thinks that software is one of the major enablers to change this current paradigm and really make commercial sense.

NITIN DAHAD: As you know, I attended the Imaging Track for most of the two and a half-day conference.

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: What did you see as the key trends? Tell me about it. What was very interesting for you? In what sense were you surprised by what was said during this track?

NITIN DAHAD: Okay, so in fact I think strong… there’s a strong convergence between microelectronics and photonics. And that’s coupled with smaller and smarter devices. And there was a lot of talk, as we always hear at these conferences, of more than more. And sort of getting more performance using waver-level 3D stacking for example so that it can get more intelligence at the edge. So there’s that whole trend. And then 3D sensing I think is a big one. And then hyperspectral imaging was one of those which sort of surprised me in terms of the focus on that. So we heard about a lot of the technology in the applications.

ANNE-FRANCOISE PELE: Oh, good! Very interesting. Anything you want to highlight in particular?

NITIN DAHAD: So two things I think struck me. And that’s in this whole sort of conversation that the industry and sort of beyond industry sort of in the consumer world, we’re talking about — or the public world, rather — smart cities and health. And to highlight that, there was a very, very strong examples. And on the smart cities, for example, the lady from PNI Sensor basically was telling us that there’s nobody really doing smart cities as a big sort of smart city end to end. But there’s a lot of smart verticals. And one of those that’s they’re interested in is smart parking. And she did highlight some good examples of smart parking that they’ve implemented in Amritsar in India, in Montreal, the City of Montreal and California. And what surprised me is that I would have thought smart things don’t really generate a return on investment. But all of these cities were generating a return on investment. And you can read about that in our 10 Highlights at MEMS & Imaging Sensors Summit.

And then the other thing was the health care. And specifically what impressed me– and again, you’ll see that in our write-up– is an implanted subretinal photo diode array for people who have age-related macular degeneration, which is actually quite a common thing. And what they’ve done is, they’ve got a breakthrough subretinal wireless chip, which actually mimics the retinal function. You know what, I can wax lyrical about this, but the way this enables people to process images and see images, it seems like it is a way forward.

BRIAN SANTO: There are more details on these and other projects in the article that Nitin and Anne-Francoise wrote. On the eetimes web page with this podcast, there’s a link directly to their story.

The Internet of Things was envisioned many, many years ago. One of the open questions was how they’d connect. Possible existing options included WiFi, Bluetooth, and Zigbee, but those were mostly for local area networks — LANs — and many IoT applications would require a wireless protocol that could cover more space — a wide area network, or WAN.

And so engineers started proposing wireless WAN options. There were Weightless, SigFox, LoRaWAN, nWave, InGeNu, and more. Some still with us, some not. Telephone companies, meanwhile, proposed the use of 3G, 4G, and then 5G for the IoT.

The thing is, any given wireless connectivity option might be good for one subset of applications, but not for others. The profusion of options all got very confusing very quickly, and it’s been that way for some time.

Advocates for WiFi are represented by the Wireless Broadband Alliance — or the WBA. Advocates for LoRaWAN are represented by the LoRa Alliance. The WBA and LoRa Alliance got together earlier this year and a couple of weeks ago published a white paper on how the two wireless schemes can be used to complement each other to create new business opportunities.

I recently recorded a conversation with Bruno Tomas, the WBA’s Director of Programs and Project Management, and with Remi Lorrain, the LoRaWAN Ambassador from LoRa Alliance member company Semtech, where he’s the Global LoRaWAN Networks Director.

I asked Bruno and Remi to characterize where the market is for wireless IoT connectivity, in order to put into perspective where the market might be going. The first voice you hear will be Remi Lorrain’s.

REMI LORRAIN: Across the world, players, engineers, business owners have been developing for the last 20 years more than 20 different technologies. It’s a good sign for the market. That means that it brings innovation on the market. But on the other hand, of course, it brings a lot of confusion. And that’s the question now of interoperability. So with regards to LoRaWAN and WiFi, the characteristic is to be completely complementary in the IoT to get a global footprint, which eliminates some risk of non-interop. And of course, these two technologies are completely focused on scaling up and interop with each other to be the most complementary possible because in the world no technology is able to address all the use cases.

BRIAN SANTO: Right. So the inability to drive all use cases is kind of what’s going on here. Can you give us a rundown of the characteristics of LoRaWAN and the characteristics of WiFi and where there might be some overlap and where each of them would be good for different use cases?

REMI LORRAIN: So regarding WiFi, of course I will let Bruno explain. Regarding LoRaWAN, we are low-power, long-range and low-footprint technologies for mostly sensor-based applications. So we serve most of the time hard-to-reach areas, where you cannot intervene easily to replace your sensors for 10- to 15 years’ time. So I will let Bruno explain what WiFi is doing in that space.

BRUNO TOMAS: Yeah, certainly. That sounds good. And in fact, based on also the history of IoT evolution, I started to work and look into this area where the industry was still calling it machine-to-machine, and it has evolved ever since. But I believe one thing is common to let’s say these 10- to 15 years, is that everyone is looking for the best use cases to fit the technology, and in terms of the WiFi bringing an external type of perspective, for the first time, with the dawn of new generation of WiFi 6 that is coming, the issues that were reported in the past are being solved. So this means that two simple things, such as being more efficient when lower data rates are required so allowing devices to use less power or support greater coverage ranges. It’s becoming a reality. For instance, significant device battery life.

So if you look into operators that invest in WiFi to cover normal users or citizens or enterprise, but at the same time, they also have a lot of infrastructure. And for specific use cases that Remi mentioned, it makes a perfect fit if you can combine both in the same box and save some costs and have better and more efficient deployments.

BRIAN SANTO: Let’s talk about some of those potential deployments. Are there uses cases, are the examples of some of your colleagues in some of the various alliances that you represent, are the examples of where they’re finding that they have an application that requires some communication between a network that is being connected by LoRaWAN with a network that’s being connected by WiFi?

REMI LORRAIN: The most famous application of LoRaWAN and WiFi is location. I mean, one of the largest applications of the IoT is to look at assets or objects — it can be moving or fixed. So there is no perfect technology for that. WiFi allows to locate accurately objects, where LoRaWAN is able to look at with less accuracy but less battery consumption. So the thing is, we saw several applications in the world where you use WiFi in the building for an accurate location, and you can switch on LoRaWAN where you are outdoors and you want to save your battery. But you would get some less accurate location. So you leverage the strength of each of the technologies we explained in the beginning of the call.

BRIAN SANTO: Excellent. That’s a kind of a category. Are there are specific instances of someone trying to implement that or somebody wanting to do what you just described?

REMI LORRAIN: You’ve got tens, if not hundreds of solution makers in the world today building a chip with the WiFi and the LoRaWAN capabilities. I mean, today in the location techniques, with a device moving from indoor to outdoor, it’s become a kind of basic state of the market to use the two technologies. It’s not something emerging, it’s something already up to speed.

BRIAN SANTO: Are we talking about smart phones or some other device?

REMI LORRAIN: Of course, this common application has started to scale up on the B2B market, and today you don’t have a consumer market with that kind of application. So it’s focused on the B2B market.

BRIAN SANTO: Okay. I’m trying to imagine what the specific device might be, what it is that someone might carry around from inside a building to outside. An identification badge, for example. What type of thing are we talking about?

REMI LORRAIN: You imagine a car maker having to transport parts across Europe, and maybe most of the time you are in a lorry — in a truck. So you don’t need an accurate location. You just need to know in which country you are, and near which city. When you arrive at the factory and here you have to manage your logistics on site, and you need a more accurate location at the time you arrive in the target factory. Okay? So that’s a very good example.

BRIAN SANTO: Got it. Thank you. A moment ago, you mentioned that there are many manufacturers developing silicon. Are we talking about ICs that combine …transceivers for both WiFi and LoRaWAN on board, on the same chip? Or are we talking about chipsets?

REMI LORRAIN: So you’ve got two ways to do that. Basically it’s exactly what you said. These solution makers or device makers gathering the two chips, the WiFi chips and the LoRaWAN chips on the same motherboard. That’s one way to do it. And there are also some developments at the module level to embed the two technologies, and not to only rely on the basic chips I would say, but to optimize for battery consumption most of the time. The way you collect the data. So either you can take off-the-shelf WiFi and LoRaWAN chips, or you develop at the module level, at the chip level, more sophisticated system. But it’s always at the chip level, right?

BRIAN SANTO: What can you tell us about some of the infrastructure? We just talked about the chips, what type are we talking about different types or categories of base station? How would the infrastructure be developed?

REMI LORRAIN: So it comes to the main point here. You can easily understand that deploying two networks cost twice. And the beauty is, it’s exactly what you explained in the white paper. WiFi has been deployed across the world for tens of years. You have a huge WiFi infrastructure with access points across the world. We can talk about more than 200 million units. And it’s about deploying the LoRaWAN gateways at the same location as the WiFi access point and therefore reducing your network cost by a significant factor. That’s a key opportunity for the two technologies to leverage the same network. At the gateway level, but also at the cloud level.

BRUNO TOMAS: If I can complement, and I believe this is an especially interesting point for those deploying these technologies, is that even though you may already have let’s say the WiFi or LoRa, if you do this co-location, there are a lot of opportunities at the service level in trying to align several aspects of the infrastructure. So for instance, identify management. Of course the question comes, what do we do regarding policy? So if I have a client that is supporting both WiFi and LoRa, what type of decisions can be made? So some of the work we have been developing on the interoperability of both technologies goes around identifying the specific mechanisms for identity handling. So for instance with LoRa, of course, we have the net IDs, …, record handling, is something that we have been working to align practices and procedures. So there are opportunities for, if you want just roaming, or if you want to receive other types of clients that theoretically could not connect to your network, there are solutions now that can start to apply that.

And of course, we are talking about an unlicensed world. That’s another very interesting commonality between both. So WiFi of course uses unlicensed bands. LoRa also uses an unlicensed band. So the learnings that we have from the WiFi industry and by working win the LoRa Alliance I think is proving very useful for those looking to deploy both systems.

BRIAN SANTO: Fantastic. You mentioned LoRa and WiFi are unlicensed. There’s a prominent licensed protocol out there. We’ve got 4G and 5G. Also have ambitions to help support the Internet of Things, or Internet of Things applications. Can we conceive of a time when end users will find ways to integrate not just LoRa and WiFi, but might there also be 4G and 5G use cases that we could conceivably see being integrated somehow into a larger wireless system.

REMI LORRAIN: So I like your question, because we are in the 5G story, 5G hype, and everybody’s talking about the cellular IoT, right? That was your question I think. And look at WiFi. WiFi has been proving to the market that very fruitful collaboration between cellular and WiFi. Do you know that today WiFi is carrying most of 50% of the voice traffic across the world? Not many people know that. So it’s a good illustration that an unlicensed technology can collaborate with licensed technology to increase the business value. And I think that for LoRaWAN in 5G, it would be exactly the same story as WiFi. I mean, cellular IoT cannot access all the use cases.

So in a way, at the end of the day, we need to serve customers. And I think that the 5G charter is clever in a way that’s in the 5G specification. There is a kind of a huge work of interconnection with non-3G GP technologies. WiFi is already in. LoRaWAN is currently looking for ways to interconnect. But I think that’s the way the future will be. Tomorrow it will be impossible to have either cellular technology or non-cellular technology to cover so many verticals, and only the collaboration, the interconnection, will solve the business problem.

BRIAN SANTO: One big happy family!

REMI LORRAIN: Yes. Sure. It’s like a family. Sometimes it happens well, sometimes we can argue, but at the end, we serve the same market with the same objective. It’s to address all the use cases, right?

BRUNO TOMAS: And we have a very good concept for this family. So we call it in fact convergence here on our list of Alliance priorities. And the main objective here is to basically help our partners with whatever investments they’re doing today and investing in WiFi 6 and LoRaWAN. So all of that carries on being completely reusable by the 5G system, 5G services. So for the first time I think we are decoupling a bit what is the new radio and what is the service level. And all the work, as Remi pointed out, that we have been doing around the last ten years for achieving a very good WiFi offload. All our collaboration we do is leading also to warranty that we’ll have this interoperability in the near terms. And those protocols that were built for roaming and that work now, the idea is that more and more licensed technologies bring a proposal to make these estimates more effective.

BRIAN SANTO: So that was Bruno Tomas from the WBA, which represents WiFi interests, and Remi Lorrain of silicon vendor Semtech, speaking on behalf of the LoRa Alliance. We’ve got a link on the podcast transcript page for their joint paper.

Every company does financial and market forecasting. Semiconductor companies are no different on that score. As we get to the end of 2019, industry executives and industry analysts are naturally looking ahead to 2020.

But the semiconductor industry is subject to trends specific to the electronics business. One of those is the boom-and-bust cycle of the memory segment of the market. Bolaji Ojo is global editor-in-chief of AspenCore Media. He’s been covering the semiconductor industry for a long time. As predictions for the semiconductor industry in 2020 roll in, Bola thinks they’re all forgetting something fundamental. Here he is with international editor Junko Yoshida.

JUNKO YOSHIDA: This is a new section. We call it, “What’s on Bola’s Mind This Week?” So let me ask you this: What’s on your mind this week?

BOLAJI OJO: What’s on my mind is Micron Technology, the DRAM and the memory market, the semiconductor market, and especially this key question of whether or not the electronics industry, or rather the semiconductor market, has gotten rid of its notorious boom-and-bust cycles. That’s what’s on my mind.

JUNKO YOSHIDA: Is it, well I mean everybody knows that this is an eternal cycle for memories. So what’s your take? What’s going to happen next year?

BOLAJI OJO: Well actually, you know, before I address the issue of what’s going to happen next year, this is a thing that’s been happening now. Over the course of the last maybe three to five years, everybody talks [about how] the industry got rid of its cycles. They became very mild. And now all of a sudden we’ve now seen the return to crazy cycles. So here are the examples of craziness, okay?

Take a look at what’s happening in the industry. You look and see, in the first half of this year, Samsung Electronics, its sales for the first six months of 2019 went down 33%. SK Hynix, down 35%. Micron Technology, down 29%. Qualcomm, down 11%. And on and on. Nvidia, down 21%. Many of these companies are in that sector — they are in the memory market. And when you want to look at what’s happening in the electronics, in the semiconductor market, if you want to see what’s happening now and what’s going to happen in the future, you have to start by looking at the memory market.

Now, that was in the first half of the year. In August, okay, for the quarter ended in August and its fiscal ended August 30, Micron reported its latest revenue. And at glowing, you see the same pattern. Year over year, sales down 42% for the August quarter sales. That’s huge! I mean, in what other market and in what other industry do you see this kind of decline? That is what is happening, and that’s why this is in my mind.

The fact that somehow because we managed to get hold of our inventory overruns, now we think, Oh, okay. You know what? We’ve gotten rid of the cycles. That’s not the case. And this has very significant implications for the industry. The moment you think that you’ve gotten rid of the cycles, then you don’t pay close attention again to things like capex, to things like inventory, to things like pricing.

Now, average pricing, ASP as they call it in the industry, is now all vertically, sliding down on one side in the DRAM, kind of firming up elsewhere. So many of the people — and I think, Junko, you’ve written about this sometime in the past — many of the folks in the industry today, especially the young ones, they’ve not really experienced the real cycle of this market. So let me ask you then…

JUNKO YOSHIDA: Well, before you go, I just… Where did you get the notion that people were thinking that they were able to get rid of this cycle?

BOLAJI OJO: It’s all over the place! You would not think of that — you would not think of it like that. But a lot of people thought — and there have been articles about this. All you need to do is Google it, and you will see articles where people are saying, Well, the industry is now kind of cycle-free because components, electronic components now go into almost every segment of the global economy. As a result, you know, the cycles that are kind of very specific to the market have now been, you know, like kind of, you know, silently we’ve pressed it down to the point where we can manage it.

JUNKO YOSHIDA: Right, right. Well, back in the days, 1990s for example, memory market was really limited to things like servers and workstations and PCs. Now what you’re saying is memory, well chips in general, I mean, they go everywhere, right? So the available total market has really broadened. That’s sort of how the idea or the theory goes: the bigger the market is, the cycle threat somehow has lessened.

BOLAJI OJO: And I think that what is concerning right now, Junko, is, we don’t really know, we don’t really have people in key positions anymore who have actually experienced the wild swings of the market. When you have not experienced it, or when you think that those swings have gone away, then you are not prepared for how to manage it. This is something every semiconductor manufacturer, every OEM, every distributor, every contract manufacturer, folks in purchasing and engineering, have to be aware of. You need to pay attention to the cycle. It has not gotten away. It is still there.

JUNKO YOSHIDA: So your prognosis for 2020?

BOLAJI OJO: Well, I mean, what a lot of people are saying right now is that it’s going to be better. 2020 is going to be great, it’s going to be fantastic. People are ridding of Q4.

JUNKO YOSHIDA: Why?

BOLAJI OJO: Why is 2020 going to be great? I don’t subscribe to it. You know, look: The reason I don’t, because you can never really be sure. Anybody who tells you that they can see further out and 60 days in this industry is just fooling you and fooling themselves. That kind of outlook, that kind of ability to look penetratively into the supply chain and the demand chain has gone away. We just don’t have it, because there are two– again, for the very specific reason that there are too many sectors of this industry, of the global economy, rather, that components, electronic components go into.

So you don’t really know which one is just going to suddenly shoot up and propel the market higher. And you don’t know which one might just suddenly kind of fold and crater the entire industry. So I cannot tell you. I mean, you know, when I’m looking at the DRAM numbers and I look at the market decline of 42%, then I’m asking myself, you know, What’s going to happen next year? Are we going to see it snap back? If you see a snap back of 142%, then maybe you’re back, 50% you’re back at the same point. So you need to go faster than that to actually see stronger growth. And what’s that going to mean, Junko, for topics?

I’m writing a blog now that I’m going to share with you later on. And my question about that is, Are we going to start another panic in this industry where companies start cutting capital expenditures, they start cutting R&D, they start laying off people in thousands because they want to keep margins at a good level. If you do that, and then in March 2020 the market suddenly snaps back, what do you get? You get a sharp upswing with no inventory in place. That’s what’s on my mind.

BRIAN SANTO: The global economy has experienced more than 10 years of generally increasing prosperity. To assume that growth is going to go on “just because” seems to me a dicey combination of optimism, laziness and arrogance. We’ll have to see how 2020 plays out.

That’s your Weekly Briefing for the week ending September 27th.

This podcast is Produced by AspenCore Studio. It was Engineered by Taylor Marvin and Greg McRae at Coupe Studios. The Segment Producer was Kaitie Huss.

You can get to this podcast on the EE Times web site, through services such as Blubrry, iTunes, and Spotify. The transcript of this podcast can be found on EETimes.com, complete with links to the articles we refer to, along with photos and video.

Check in with us next Friday for the next edition of EE Times on Air. I’m Brian Santo.