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January 2016 • The PCB Magazine 37 FACING INCREDIBLE TIMES: ROBIN TAYLOR'S VISION OF THE FUTURE computing, and Google buying all the robotic companies in the world, it reminded me some- how of the Terminator movies. This is not my conclusion, but it's a possibility that this is how the world could end. It's a kind of light-hearted look at what's happening in the market with some serious overtones because clearly some of the things that are happening just now in packaging could be a significant threat to our business. We have to be very aware of what's happening so at the very least we can try to par- ticipate and find some solutions for the future. I also inquired what the main points were that he sought to bring over: In general, looking at the market and then looking at what's happening in the mobile mar- ket, as we see it is being driven by mobile. Also, wearables, the Internet of Things, and the Inter- net of Everything are unknown segments, but there are a lot of predictions for growth in them, as well as the growth of wafer level packaging, especially for fan out wafer level packaging. Of course, since we actually wrote this paper, there has been some announcements in this field, like TSMC with their InFo wafer level package that is rumoured will take all the Apple business for the A10 processor, or most of it. This eliminates the package substrate, which is of course of sig- nificant interest to us. Looking at all the trends and then looking at what the substrate guys are doing to try to compete in this brave new world, then just a kind of semi-light-hearted look at what we might think might happen, with some serious overtones, for the next 10 years. The IBM TrueNorth chip core for cogni- tive computing is actually a fantastic achieve- ment. Artificial intelligence is being pursued by a number of companies who previously had no tangible interest in it. All the advances in health care with the IoT, so that we can become CEOs of our own health—you can monitor your body, it can be automatically uploaded to your doctor, and he can advise you immediate- ly if something is amiss. Even things like block chain where you have the potential for digital secure voting—things that we couldn't dream Figure 6: iBm's truenorth chip core array, capable of 46 billion synaptic operations per second. Figure 7: security/privacy remains a concern: Digital everything = Digital minefield? Feature