Alessandro of Uni Bologna

The arrival of the Covid Epidemic in early 2020 was soon followed but the Crisis of Semiconductors, creating a major shortage of integrated circuits components a.k.a. chips, which world is still facing as of today. All the major media outlets easily connected this crisis to the sudden switch to a work-from-home policy adopted by the major companies, which increase the demand of personal computing devices, monitors, webcams, and other electronic gadgets, But, not much time after, the chips shortage effected also the automotive, commercial, and industrial fields, which in principle are using almost completely different components. Consequently, the question that arises is if the Covid Epidemic was the real cause of the chips shortage crisis, or just "the straw that overflows the camel's back". In this presentation we are trying to highlight some other possible and more subtle factors that have been latent for decades and could represent more significant causes. We will also argue how persistent policies of specialization and protectionism, both at geographic and corporate level, exacerbated by the current tragic geopolitical situation, represent barriers that need to be overcome by the community to increase the resilience of our society and help preventing similar events in the future.

Biography:

Alessandro Piovaccari is Visiting Fellow at UniBO, board member of the GSA CTO Council, the Center for Leadership Education at the Johns-Hopkins University, advisor for the Berkeley Skydeck and Silicon Catalyst startup incubators and newly appointed to VP of Conferences for the IEEE SSCS. He has more than 25 years of technical and management experience in the semiconductor industry, including CTO of Silicon Labs. He co-architected and led many wireless and IoT SoCs with a 4 billion devices shipments, including, the first single-chip TV tuner, used by nine of the top-ten TV makers and 70% market share. He holds PhD and Laurea degrees in EECS from UniBO and a Post-Grad (summa cum laude) in EECS from JHU. He is a Senior Member of IEEE and Lifetime Fellow at Silicon Labs, received an IEEE SSCS award in leadership, and holds 32 US patents, including a Patent of the Year award.