Ken Hansen

CEO, Semiconductor Research Corporation

Ken Hansen joined Semiconductor Research Corporation as its President and CEO in June 2015. Ken brings his experience as the former Vice President and Chief Technology Officer with Freescale Semiconductor. Prior to becoming CTO at Freescale, Ken was Vice President and led Freescale’s Chief Development Office where he improved design efficiency and reduced product cost for all Freescale business units. Previously, he held several senior technology and management positions at Freescale and Motorola leading research and development teams. He received the BSEE and MSEE degrees from the University of Illinois where he also has been recognized as an ECE Distinguished Alumni, is a Fellow of the IEEE, and holds 11 U.S. patents. Ken is an industry veteran, with 40 years of experience in technical management and system/circuit design, primarily in the area of wireless communications.

Title: A Research Agenda to Drive the Semiconductor Industry – SRC Taking the Lead

Abstract: The semiconductor industry compounded annual growth rate has dropped to 2.2% over the last five years. At the same time the phenomenon known as Moore’s Law that has been driven by dimensional scaling has also slowed. There is a need for transformative innovation to provide new silicon and software content to reinvigorate the growth in the industry. There are many market opportunities identified such as the Internet of Things where many have projected 50 billion connected devices by 2020, the continued electrification of the vehicle particularly in the ADAS and infotainment space with a goal to create an autonomous vehicle, the eHealth market for personalized, real-time diagnosis and treatment and the unbounded need for computational power to solve problems that we cannot even begin to attack today because of limited bandwidth. SRC in conjunction with SIA and NSF last year produced a report named “Rebooting the IT Revolution” which lays out a research agenda to begin the path towards the transformative innovation required to meet these market needs. This presentation will identify industry technical challenges, introduce the proposal for a combined public-private research agenda to remove the roadblocks that lie ahead, highlight some current SRC funded research supporting this initiative and identify SRC’s efforts to take the lead.