In this talk, the trends of the major application fields in the era of convergence are analyzed. The emphasis is on the challenges the semiconductor industry will have to face to address these new trends and opportunities.


Applications are becoming increasingly complex and the need to guarantee the coexistence of a wider range of applications on a single chip makes system-level integration a real challenge. Most of the applications will run on platforms designed for portable products, pushing the industry to emphasize power budgets for new designs, both at silicon and at system level. From the platform architecture perspective, multiprocessing is already a reality, and the industry will have to find new paradigms to handle the increased complexity at the system, embedded software, and at the silicon implementation levels.


The talk concludes with future perspectives from the viewpoint of ST's advanced research organization.

Alessandro Cremonesi received a Doctorate in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pavia, Italy, in 1984. After a period of research activity in the opto-electronics field at the University of Pavia, he joined STMicroelectronics working in different fields from telecommunications to audio/video digital signal processing and multimedia applications. At present, Alessandro Cremonesi is V.P. of Strategy & System Technology Group and General Manager of Advanced System Technology (AST) Group at STMicroelectronics with the responsibility of the Corporate System R&D and the Corporate Strategic Marketing activities across 14 different STMicroelectronics Labs worldwide.