CASPA eLetter: No. 199, November 15, 2020

Dear CASPA’s Sponsors, members and friends:

It’s my greatest honor and privilege to take on this historic duty to continue CASPA’s missions like all my respectable predecessors and to lead this most influential non-profitable semiconductor professional association, to embrace the disruptive innovations happened at Silicon Valley.

Since early 2020, COVID-19 has been turned into a global crisis. It is the biggest challenge of our life time. No industry is immune to the impact of COVID-19, including semiconductor industry. But we don’t need to be panic. Crisis in Chinese consists of two brush strokes, one for danger and the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger–but recognize the opportunity. Just like Einstein said “in the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity”, let us check where the opportunities in semiconductor industry are.

Based on Accenture’s prediction on impact of COVID-19, the sectors such as consumer electronics and IT for small business has been negatively impact due to low demands; While network/communication, computing and storage sectors actually get favorable impact due to 5G plan and greater bandwidth demand while many of us still work from home.

While some sectors of semiconductor business are growing, 2020 Semiconductor revenue projection has been reduced by $55B to $415B. The impact of COVID-19 is still unknown at current stage. For a non-profit organization, it will be an even more challenging under current circumstances. We will exercise the fundamental characteristic of semiconductor material, adjustability. Like Charles Darwin said “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change”.

Now the question is how do we do it? We will adapt to industry trend and global environmental change, work on the following areas,

1. Number one is connection. We will enhance the connections among our sponsors and members. Help our sponsors explore new business opportunities and resources. We can even expand our connections through collaboration between CASPA and our alliance partners through events with better programs at larger scale, leveraging joint resources and shared networks.

2. The second one is communication. We will improve our communication with our members, identify their most critical needs and listen to their suggestions, (All suggestions to CASPA can be sent to [email protected].) then we could organize our events accordingly. Even if most CASPA events will be held online in the new future, we could still expand our communication through the internet. There is no geographic limitation like the physical event may have.

3. The third one is career. It consists of two parts: first, we will have CASPA Virtual Job Fair to assist our corporate sponsors to find the talents they need, and to help our individual members to explore new career opportunities. Second, we will have career development seminars for our members such that they get a chance to learn from other more experienced professionals who will help them to see things more clearly and advance their career more quickly.

4. The last one is college program. We will expand our connections to colleges by inviting top professors in the industry to share their research with our members. We could also promote the internship opportunities to the college students/graduates. With this new vision, I believe there will be more young professionals joining CASPA’s family and we will become younger and more energetic!

With these entire 4C’s, connection, communication, career and college program, we would like to bring the value to our corporate and individual members, as well as our semiconductor community. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continuous help and support to CASPA. We are looking forward for another, may be challenging, but productive year in 2021 for CASPA.

Sincerely yours,

Xiaodong Zhang, Ph.D.

Chairman and President

CASPA