SEMICON Taiwan 2014 is being held today at the Nangang Exhibition Hall with more than 600 exhibiting companies and a total of 1,410 booths.

This is an increase of 10% from last year. Yesterday’s pre-exhibition press conference included companies, such as TSMC, Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), Hermes Microvision Inc. (HMI), ASML, and Applied Materials as participants.

Regarding the next phase of development for the global semiconductor industry, John Wei believes that each business will focus on three major tasks: ultra-low power consumption, sensors, and packaging technology.

John Wei analyzed the semiconductor industry’s future growth focus for mobile devices, wearable devices, and Internet of Things devices. There is an inevitable trend of product volume moving in the direction of being light and micro.

However, the requirements for product operations are gradually increasing. Demands for battery life are a major factor. Finding ways to lower the cost of products through advances in process technology will be a major task for the semiconductor industry.

Developing sensors is also a major challenge facing the semiconductor industry, explained John Wei. Sensors are media for collecting data in the surrounding context, and they affect the ways in which electronic products interact with people. He cited the example of Apple’s Siri as a completely new system from the development of sensors. In the future there will definitely be numerous different requirements for sensors.

John Wei also believes that high-end ICs packaging and testing will also be a major field in the future for the semiconductor industry.

He explained that overall end products are moving towards diversification in their development, and their functions have not moved as far towards standardization as models in the past. Businesses will satisfy each kind of demand through innovations in technology manufacturing.