See also: International Electronics Forum 2009 - News Roundup
The answer to the slow growth problem besetting the semiconductor industry is to be: "In the right place going after the right space", Young Sohn, CEO of Inphi, told the International Electronics Forum 2009 (IEF 2009) in Geneva this morning.
The right place to be, according to Sohn, is in the Cloud. Cloud computing is a growth industry Inphi, said Sohn, is growing at 45% a year. "You have to pick the right space to grow and to bet your company around," said Young, who also servers as a director of ARM.
Young quoted IDC as saying that 25% of all incremental IT spend growth by 2012 will be spend on Cloud computing, and quoted Merrill Lynch as saying Cloud computing will be a $100bn market by 2011.
So Inphi is positioned as a purveyor of very high-speed analogue components aimed at server manufacturers and server farms where customers demand the fastest possible delivery of their information.
Young gave commercial examples of the need for speed. According Amazon, every 100ms of latency costs them 1% in sales; according to Google, an extra 500ms in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%; according to Tabb Group, 'a broker could lose $4m per milli-second if their electronic trading platform is 5ms behind the competition'.
A big problem for the server people, said Young, is that: "Memory capacity/performance is not scaling in step with CPUs. DRAM density is not scaling. Processing cores multiply but memory DIMM capacity remains the same from 2006 to 2009. The server people are finding DRAM density a major problem."