When you go to the newly launched www.gsaglobal.org site (which can also be reached by clicking on the same old fsa.org link), you see a graphic, where the "F" in the old FSA logo morphs into a "G," representing the new acronym for what was, until last week, the Fabless Semiconductor Association and what has become the Global Semiconductor Alliance.
But it will take more than the changing of a letter in an acronym and a wholesale naming makeover for the new alliance to live up to its grandiose name.
Since its founding in 1994, the former FSA has done a bang-up job creating an organization of fabless and foundry semiconductor manufacturers, design and final-manufacturing suppliers, and support groups. The group has gone from an original core of 45 founding companies members to some 500 companies on its rolls, making it one of the largest, most wide-ranging global chip industry associations. IDM heavyweights like Intel and Samsung have joined, and Applied Materials has paid its dues, in addition to the long list of usual fabless community suspects.
Here's how the "new" alliance states its mission: "The mission of GSA is to accelerate the growth and increase the return on invested capital of the global semiconductor industry by fostering a more effective fabless ecosystem through collaboration, integration and innovation. To fulfill this mission, GSA will address the challenges and enable industrywide solutions within the supply chain, including intellectual property (IP), electronic design automation (EDA)/design, wafer manufacturing, test and packaging. The Alliance will provide a platform for meaningful global collaboration; identify and articulate market opportunities; encourage and support entrepreneurship; and provide members with comprehensive and unique market intelligence."
Sounds noble enough, with obvious evolution from FSA's original edict to "proliferate the adoption of the fabless business model." Still, I don't see enough components to justify the use of the new name, since a deeper look reveals some major missing or underrepresented components of the true semiconductor ecosystem. And, to stir the pot, there's the comments by FSA, er, GSA executive director Jodi Shelton in Peter Clarke's piece in EETimes.
"The name change is really catching up with what we've been doing for about four years," she said. "We have the complete supply chain represented on the board."
The complete supply chain? A check of GSA's board shows 13 new openings for the 20-member panel, divvied up as follows: five fabless, three foundry, one IDM, two back-end supplier positions, and two design partner positions. Some existing board folks came back to fill those slots--like Mentor Graphics' Wally Rhine---and others fill out the rest of the governing council. So maybe not the complete supply chain.
First off, having one IDM on the board is not exactly representative of today's chipmaking realities: Even if there are more ICs than ever coming from fabless houses and being manufactured by foundries, most chips are still made by IDMs and fab-lite companies' own fabs. But the lack of representation by the wafer-processing equipment, materials, and subsystems companies (AKA most of the SEMI members) on the new alliance's board points to the pretty egregious absence of a rather important part of said supply chain.
So Ms. Shelton overstated things a bit, as well as in other statements where she still couldn't help but insert the word "fabless," despite assurances that the group would be "addressing challenges" across the entire semi ecosystem, the same one not fully represented in the GSA! Still sounds like a souped-up FSA to me (which is not a bad thing), a group that will hopefully work effectively with the other industry associations representing the sectors and players that it does not.
When an organization decides to change its name to something as high-falutin' as the Global Semiconductor Alliance (sound the fanfare here), then it better be inclusive of all the constituencies, especially the ones who make the wafers and manufacture the tools and materials that help turn those wafers into chips. In other words, the entire semiconductor supply chain, not just certain portions of it.
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