Semiconductor firms eye edge-computing opportunities

With edge computing promising to become an important part of cloud systems, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is eyeing the market opportunities with its advanced 7nm process technology, according to industry sources.

TSMC’s backend partners including Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) and Chunghwa Precision Test Technology (CHPT) are also expected to enter the mobile edge computing field with their respective fan-out packaging and wafer probing services, said the sources.

The design complexity of hardware chips for edge computing is similar to that of high-end smartphone application processors, the sources indicated. Chips for edge computing are being regarded as the market segment that will bring business opportunities to SoC developers including Qualcomm, MediaTek and HiSilicon, as well as a key application TSMC’s 7nm process is targeted at.

Vendors including Apple, Intel and Samsung are also looking to grasp business opportunities in the field of edge computing, the sources noted.

In the era of artificial intelligence (AI), supercomputers are the center of cloud computing systems while edge computing performs data processing at the edge of the network to optimize cloud computing systems located at factories and enterprises. In other words, edge computing will help speed up data processing at various IoT devices and reduce latency to enable almost real-time analysis of big data.