In his brilliant book “The World is Flat”, the award-winning New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman explained the flattening of the world happened at the dawn of the twenty-first century as a result of tidal waves of globalization, outsourcing, and internet. Many manufacturing and services jobs are now progressively outsourced to countries with a large pool of cheaper but talented knowledge workers such as India and China. And even high-end jobs like chip design and software development can be outsource-able. One interesting news article proclaimed that half the work on Intel new 80-core chip was done by engineers at the Intel India research center. Friedman thinks that every country and individual are now part of the global supply chain. I emphatize very much with Friedman’s views. In fact, several big semiconductor companies like Intel, AMD and STMicroelectronics are trying to tap into this limitless pool of knowledge workers in India and China. However, I think these companies need to ensure their company valuable IPs are protected. One strategy is to “modularize” their outsourcing jobs, so that no individual or team would be able to capture all the knowledge to “reproduce” a certain product such as microprocessor or software. To gain a deeper insight on this Pulizer Prize-winning author and his book, watch the following series of videos that I’ve collated:

Interestingly, a week ago, the Indian government has announced a capital subsidy of up to 25 percent to attract investments from global majors such as Intel, AMD and STM for setting up semiconductor fabrication and high-end chip design. Announcing the policy, the IT Minister Dayanidhi Maran said the Indian government would trigger an immediate investment commitment of $10 billion on semiconductor FDI.

Ms. Poornima Shenoy, President, India Semiconductor Association ISA said:

“This is extremely positive. The policy will provide an impetus for the further growth of the sector, the electronics industry and the overall ecosystem. The domestic market for electronics goods is expected to reach USD 363 billion by 2015 and the domestic demand for semiconductors alone will be USD 36B. This policy will go a long way in making India as an attractive destination for global semiconductor and hi-tech companies plus investors.

With the new policy, we are expecting to see more semiconductor FDI and outsourcing flow into India in the coming months.

Listen to these recent Semiconductor International interviews with Industrial experts on interconnects, high-k metal gates.

	2/15/2007 IMEC Fellow Guido Groeseneken: Replacing Copper Interconnects With CNTs	[audio:http://www.reed-electronics.com/semiconductor/contents/media/IMEC_Guido_Groeseneken2.mp3]
	2/9/2007 IMEC Fellow,Paul Heremans: Scaling Predictions	[audio:http://www.reed-electronics.com/semiconductor/contents/media/IMEC_Paul_Heremans2.mp3]
	1/28/2007 Sematech Director Raj Jammy: Sematech Achieves Breakthrough in Dual Metal Gates	[audio:http://www.reed-electronics.com/semiconductor/contents/media/Sematech_RajJammy.mp3]
	2/5/2007 Paolo Gargini, director of technology strategy: Intel Materials Strategy	[audio:http://www.sikod.com/blog/audio/Intel_Paolo_Gargini.mp3]