Is the Tech Industry Ready to Rebound?

HANOVER, GERMANY -- National Semiconductor Chief Executive Officer Brian Halla refined his forecast Tuesday for the beginning of economic recovery in the technology industry.

Halla said at the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas last November that the recovery would begin on June 21, 2003, basing his prediction on a mathematical model developed by a colleague of his.

That model has been tweaked, he said Tuesday.

"The equation gave a date of June 21. We have refined the equation now. It's going to be at 2:15 p.m.," he said, adding "Pacific Time" in response to a question from the audience here on the last day of the ICT World Forum. The conference precedes the CeBIT trade show.

Getting Serious

While Halla made clear that the forecast had begun as a joke, he seemed serious about what will drive the recovery when it comes: digital video and audio.

"Computers are no longer processing ones and zeros, they are processing sight and sound," he said. "The growth will be driven by sight and sound."

Imaging technology such as that developed by Foveon of Santa Clara, California, could drive the market for IT, he said. National Semiconductor has licensed Foveon's X3 image sensor technology, which increases the density of pixels in an image captor by layering sensors for red, green, and blue light one on top of the other, rather than placing them side by side.

In addition to allowing the creation of new converged devices with low-cost integrated cameras, such image captors could also drive the market for faster, more powerful microprocessors in PCs, he said. A compressed image file from one of these captors contains so much information that in a demonstration it took a Pentium 4 processor 12 seconds to decompress it, he said.

Past the PC

But the semiconductor industry can look further afield for the roots of its recovery. While the chip industry still sells 30 percent of its output to mobile phone manufacturers, the balance of what's left has tipped: before the latest economic crash, the PC industry consumed 40 percent of the world's semiconductors, and other applications the remaining 30 percent. Now they've switched, with PCs taking only 30 percent.

So it could be the automobile industry, or medical applications, that kick off the recovery this summer, Halla said.

He cited examples of remote sensing systems in these two markets that could stimulate demand for IT products.

One, a proximity detection and remote sensing system proposed by automotive parts manufacturer Robert Bosch GmbH for inclusion in future BMW cars, combines imaging, ultrasonic, and radar technologies to provide information about obstacles around and ahead of moving vehicles.

Medical Applications

The other is a remote sensing system for conducting minimally-invasive endoscopy, colonoscopy, and proctoscopy examinations. The capsule, containing a tiny camera, light source, and radio transmitter, is designed to be swallowed by the patient. It then transmits pictures to a receiver on their belt, which stores them on its hard disk, he said.

Current versions of the device only run for eight hours, the time to examine the interior of the patient's stomach, but future versions will go further.

"The next version goes 24 hours, from launchpad to splashdown, and costs $450. Why $450? Because that's the alternative costs," Halla said. "And anybody who has had the alternative knows why the pill gets my vote," he said.

Halla predicted that, in the future, we could be swallowing as many as half a dozen of these disposable devices a year to detect different medical anomalies, which would provide a welcome revenue boost for someone in the industry.