The dramatic growth in smartphone, tablet and vertical market portable devices e.g., medical instrumentation is starting to drive major change at big tech companies.  If you watch product offerings and new positioning of Google, Microsoft, and Apple, you’ll see that significant investments are geared toward the mobile consumer and mobile information worker. These products require new device technologies such as flexible silicon and Thin flexible substrates for interconnect technology.

A good example of this is the lighting fast reorganization of Intel after Brian Krzanich’s installation as CEO.  Under Otellini’s tenure Intel missed a huge opportunity to become the chip supplier to Apple for iPhones even though the traditional conservative “number crunching/data driven” advice given to Paul Otellini went against his gut, Intel passed on the opportunity.  Their analysis misjudged the potential volume by a factor of 100 and over estimated the costs of manufacturing.  Basically the conservative mindset of “group think” there projected the iPhone as a losing business proposition.  See here  The new CEO has immediately reorganized the global enterprise to make it more agile and created a New devices Group reporting directly to him.  See here

Hopefully this will open Intel up to address new markets and new types of Si architecture along with manufacturing processes. Also the industry will hopefully follow Intel’s lead and innovate even more in this hot technology domain When you look at flexible silicon and thin film technologies, the future is clear. New companies will grow to tech giants that embrace this technology and benefit from lessons learned from the old tech giants.