Semiconductors are the foundation of devices and systems that power today’s society. Although often invisible, they are essential to our everyday lives and a sustainable future. They provide the key enabling technology for thousands of products we use every day.
In life-critical healthcare, semiconductors are essential for providing the power, precision, and reliability needed to deliver safe and effective treatment. Devices rely on semiconductors for precise electrical stimulation and control.
In modern and sustainable agriculture, semiconductors enable everything from precision farming to automated irrigation systems, allowing for increased productivity, reduced waste, and a minimised environmental impact.
Modern, state-of-the-art infrastructure, including the provision and distribution of drinking water, rely on semiconductors-powered control systems for managing large-scale water supply networks.
Semiconductors facilitate an expansion of renewable energy use, playing a central role in wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, or heat pumps. Smarter electricity grids enable reductions of CO2 emissions in buildings and ultimately shifting towards a low carbon economy.
Among the more obvious examples, semiconductors are at the core of any computer, tablet, mobile phone, or smart wearable device, allowing for ever increasing processing performances and changing the way people work, communicate, and consume media. They also ensure cyber secure solutions with ubiquitous connectivity using those devices.
Today’s smart home appliances, from fridges to cooking devices, home entertainment systems, and vacuum cleaning robots, also require semiconductors to function efficiently. Due to the world's consistent push towards a more digital life, most home appliances now contain semiconductors to provide the enhancements.
Semiconductors facilitate the ongoing shift from traditional vehicles to greener, safer, and smarter mobility solutions: focussing on connectivity, in-vehicle entertainment, autonomous driving, electrification, functional safety and security, as well as low-carbon mobility. While a car with a combustion engine contains about 1,600 different semiconductors, the amount easily doubles in electric vehicles is only increasing as mobility moves to electrification.
Secure, connected payment solutions like banking cards, smartphones, and wearables enables us to effortlessly pay for goods and services, creating greater flexibility for retailers and consumers. Likewise, electronic passports and identity cards change and simplify how citizens interact with authorities.
Semiconductors also propel striking advancements in technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, running their calculations in different ways to the processors we have gotten used to.
In industrial settings, semiconductors drive factory automation in manufacturing, as well as more efficient power and energy management through grid energy generation, distribution and consumption metering.
In short, semiconductors are strategically important building blocks of modern life. Without them, much of it would come to a halt.