台积电刘德音撰文：未来几十年是半导体的黄金时代

来源：内容来自财富，作者台积电刘德音

    半个多世纪以来，半导体一直是技术创新的核心，技术的进步与半导体性能、能耗和成本的发展同步。现在，随着对高性能计算 (HPC) 以及 5G 和 AI 应用的需求不断增长，对技术进步的需求猛增，为半导体技术新想象的未来铺平了道路，其中可以拥有无限可能实现。

    为了理解这个未来，回顾过去 60 年是有意义的，当时人们发明了一种将许多晶体管放在同一个芯片上的方法——集成电路 (IC) 或微芯片。在随后的几年中，半导体技术通过不断的小型化而进步，这包括按照摩尔定律预测的那样，集成电路上的晶体管数量每隔一年就会翻一番，该定律以美国工程师戈登·摩尔的名字命名。这种持续的进步使我们的手机拥有比 1969 年阿波罗 11 号登上月球的现在古老的 70 磅重的计算机更强大的计算能力。

    半导体技术和集成电路的一个关键属性是不断降低每个功能的成本。随着时间的推移，这种持续的成本降低导致了半导体技术的普遍部署。例如，可视电话于 1970 年由 AT&T 首次商业化，但由于成本高昂，它的客户不到 500 个。

    35年前台积电首创的纯代工模式的诞生，帮助半导体技术大规模降低成本。在这种模式下，纯代工厂运营的半导体制造厂专注于为其他公司生产 IC，而不是提供自己设计的 IC 产品。由于 IC 生产设施的建造和维护成本高昂，并且可能会大量消耗公司的资金，因此将这种生产外包给代工厂可以让公司将资源集中在最终产品上。这使得无晶圆厂（仅限设计）行业蓬勃发展，并帮助实现了使远程工作、在线学习、共享经济和娱乐流媒体成为现实的技术的大规模无处不在的部署。

    COVID-19 及其带来的封锁成为技术创新的另一个转折点，在一年内发生了超过 10 年的数字化，增加了对半导体的需求。根据麦肯锡公司的数据，按照目前的速度，到 2030 年，全球半导体年收入将增长到超过 1 万亿美元，直接贡献 3 万亿至 4 万亿美元的全球电子产品增长。然而，持续降低成本的承诺导致人们低估了半导体的价值。正如最近的半导体供应链挑战清楚地表明，半导体无处不在，在现代社会中发挥着宝贵而重要的作用。

    随着计算设备变得无处不在，通过全球网络生成和通信的数据量（通常是实时的）呈指数级增长。为了跟上这种增长，高性能计算 (HPC) 变得至关重要，并且正在呈现爆炸式增长。HPC 是高速处理数据和执行复杂计算以解决性能密集型问题的能力。如今，HPC 已经超越智能手机成为增长动力。根据Report Ocean的研究，它是半导体行业增长最快的领域之一，预计到 2027 年，全球 HPC 芯片组市场规模将从 2019 年的 43 亿美元达到 136.8 亿美元。

    虚拟世界与物理世界的融合将给社会互动的方式带来翻天覆地的变化，并将通过 HPC 应用程序实现。除了由半导体制成的大量传感器和执行器之外，虚拟世界和物理世界的这种集成还需要智能设备、可穿戴设备、物联网等硬件，以及 5G、人工智能和大数据分析等技术，用于交流和理解信息, 和决策。对于这些应用中的每一个，半导体含量及其提供的价值都将迅速增加。

    半导体将为越来越多的产品注入智能和新功能，从而提升这些产品的价值。例如，自动驾驶汽车将通过先进的芯片变得更加安全和节能，这些芯片允许执行复杂的软件功能和分析。德克萨斯大学的研究估计净能源减少 11% 至 55% 与美国当前的地面交通条件相比，基于这种预期的自动驾驶汽车能源效率。社会也期待着超出我们今天想象的新用户应用程序。半导体提供的计算能力将推动个性化和社区医学以及疫苗和药物发现。打击社交媒体上的虚假信息需要更好的算法和计算能力来训练人工智能模型。

    例如，用于创建逼真的人类质量文本的最先进的 AI 语言模型之一 GPT-3需要 300 zetta-FLOPS（超级计算机性能的衡量标准）才能在高性能计算云上进行训练。作为回报，这种 AI 语言模型所支持的能力令人印象深刻。GPT-3 最近被《纽约时报》的科技专栏作家 Kevin Roose 用来完成书评。

     人工智能通常被认为是一种主要涉及软件和算法的技术。然而，硬件技术打开了通往虚拟世界的大门，让我们能够使用从人工智能中获得的信息。因此，即使在虚拟世界中，物理也占据了中心位置。

    随着半导体技术的进步以满足 5G 和 AI 时代的需求，能源效率已成为最重要的指标，不仅因为计算能力已经因无法散热而受到限制，而且因为全球计算能源使用的升级速度比任何其他应用领域。仅由于半导体技术，计算的能源效率一直在快速发展——每两年提高 2 倍——人们普遍乐观地认为，技术将像过去 50 年那样继续像发条一样发展。

    这种经常与摩尔定律混为一谈的乐观主义也许比“定律”本身更重要。正是这种行业和整个社会共同的乐观态度，推动了行业迎接挑战，并使预言成为自我实现的预言。

    在接下来的 50 年中，下一代可能会使用虚拟现实和增强现实 (VR/AR) 作为他们与世界互动的主要方式。今天的 VR/AR 头显平均重量超过一磅，电池寿命不到两到三个小时，而且价格高昂，这让我们想起了 25 年前的手机。要达到与当今手机相同的普及水平，VR/AR 设备需要提高 100 倍以上。这只能通过不断进步的半导体技术来实现。

未来几十年将是半导体行业的黄金时代。

    在过去的 50 年里，半导体技术的发展就像在隧道里行走。前进的道路很明确，因为每个人都在努力遵循一条明确的道路——缩小晶体管。现在我们正在接近隧道的出口。隧道之外还有更多的可能性：从材料到架构的创新使新路径成为可能，以及由新应用定义的新目的地。我们不再受隧道的限制，我们现在拥有无限的创新空间。

附原文：

TSMC chairman Mark Liu describes how the world’s largest chipmaker is reimagining the semiconductor industry

——by Mark Liu

     For over half a century, semiconductors have been at the heart of technological innovation, with advancements in technology marching to the cadence of developments in semiconductor performance, energy consumption, and cost. Now, with the ever-growing demand for high-performance computing (HPC), as well as 5G and A.I. applications, the need for technological advancement has skyrocketed, paving the way for a newly imagined future for semiconductor technology, where infinite possibilities can be realized.

   To understand this future, it makes sense to look back 60 years in the past, to the invention of a way to put many transistors together on the same chip—the integrated circuit (IC) or microchip. Throughout the years that followed, semiconductor technology advanced through continuous miniaturization, which involved doubling the number of transistors on an integrated circuit every other year as predicted by Moore’s law, named after American engineer Gordon Moore. This continued advancement is what allows our mobile phones to have far more compute power than the now ancient 70-pound computer that landed Apollo 11 on the moon in 1969.

    A key attribute of semiconductor technology and the integrated circuit has been relentless reduction of cost per function. This continuous cost reduction led to ubiquitous deployment of semiconductor technologies over time. The picture-phone, for instance, was first commercialized in 1970 by AT&T, but because of its high cost, it had fewer than 500 customers.

    Large-scale cost reduction of semiconductor technology was helped along by the birth of the pure-play foundry model, pioneered by TSMC at its establishment 35 years ago. In this model, pure-play foundries operate semiconductor fabrication plants focused on producing ICs for other companies instead of offering IC products of their own design. As IC production facilities are expensive to build and maintain, and can be a huge drain on finances for companies, outsourcing this production to foundries allowed companies to focus their resources on their end product. This allowed the fabless (design only) industry to flourish and helped enable the large-scale ubiquitous deployment of the technologies that make remote working, online learning, the sharing economy, and entertainment streaming a reality today.

    COVID-19 and the lockdowns it brought along with it became another turning point for technology innovation with more than 10 years’ worth of digitization happening over a single year, increasing the demand for semiconductors. At the current pace, annual global semiconductor revenue will grow to more than $1 trillion by 2030, directly contributing to $3 trillion to $4 trillion of global electronics growth, according to McKinsey & Co. Yet, the promise of continuous cost reduction has created an expectation that underestimates the value of semiconductors. As the recent semiconductor supply-chain challenge so clearly illustrates, semiconductors are everywhere and fulfill a valuable and vital role in modern society.

    As computing devices become ubiquitous, the amount of data generated and communicated across a global network, often in real time, has grown exponentially. To keep up with this growth, high-performance computing (HPC) has become crucial and is seeing explosive growth. HPC is the ability to process data and perform complex calculations at high speeds to solve performance-intensive problems. Today, HPC has already surpassed the smartphone as a growth driver. It is one of the fastest growing segments of the semiconductor industry, with the global HPC chipset market size expected to reach $13.68 billion by 2027 from $4.30 billion in 2019, according to research from Report Ocean.

    The integration of the virtual with the physical world will bring about a sea change in the way society interacts with one another and will be enabled by HPC applications. In addition to the multitude of sensors and actuators made of semiconductors, this integration of the virtual and the physical worlds requires hardware like smart appliances, wearable devices, IoT, and technologies like 5G, A.I., and big-data analytics for communicating, understanding information, and decision-making. For each of these applications, the semiconductor content, and the value it provides, will increase rapidly.

   Semiconductors will imbue intelligence and new functionalities into more and more products, elevating the value of such products. For example, autonomous driving vehicles will become even safer and more energy efficient with advanced chips which allow for the execution of complex software functionalities and analytics. University of Texas research estimates a net energy reduction of 11% to 55% versus the current ground transportation conditions in the U.S., based off this expected autonomous vehicle energy efficiency. Society is also expecting new user applications beyond what we can imagine today. Personalized and community medicine as well as vaccine and drug discovery will get a boost from the computing power provided by semiconductors. Combating disinformation on social media will need better algorithms and computing power for training A.I. models.

    As an example, one of the most advanced A.I. language models for creating realistic human-quality text, the GPT-3, requires 300 zetta-FLOPS (a measure of supercomputer performance) to train on a high-performance compute cloud. In return, the capability enabled by this A.I. language model can be impressive. GPT-3 recently was used by Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times, to complete a book review.

A.I. is often thought of as a technology involving primarily software and algorithms. Yet, hardware technology is what opens the door to the virtual world and allows us to use the information derived from A.I. Thus, even in the metaverse, the physical takes center stage.

    As semiconductor technology advances to meet the needs of the 5G and A.I. era, energy efficiency has become the most important metric not only because computing power is already throttled by the inability to remove heat, but also because the global energy use of computing escalates faster than any other application area. Energy efficiency of computing due to semiconductor technology alone has been advancing at a rapid pace—2X every two years—and there is shared optimism that technology will continue to advance like clockwork as it did over the past 50 years.

    This shared optimism that is often conflated with Moore’s law is perhaps more important than the “law” itself. It is this shared optimism by the industry and society at large, that has propelled the industry to meet the challenge and make the prophecy a self-fulfilling one.

    In the next 50 years, the future generation will likely use virtual- and augmented-reality (VR/AR) as their principal means of interaction with the world. Today’s average VR/AR headsets weigh well over a pound, with a battery life of less than two to three hours, and a high price tag, which reminds us of the cell phones of 25 years ago. To achieve the same level of ubiquity as today’s cell phones, VR/AR devices will need to improve by more than 100 times. This can only be done with continuous advancement of semiconductor technology.

    The upcoming decades will be a golden era for the semiconductor industry. Over the past 50 years, the development of semiconductor technology has been akin to walking inside a tunnel. The way ahead was clear as there was a well-defined path that everyone diligently followed—shrinking the transistor. Now we are approaching the exit of the tunnel. There are many more possibilities outside the tunnel: new paths made possible by innovations from materials to architecture and new destinations defined by new applications. We are no longer bound by the confines of the tunnel, and we now have unlimited room for unleashed innovation.

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