This year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Sputnik, the basketball-sized satellite launched by the former Soviet Union, which sparked a technology race that became the hallmark of the Cold War era. Also this year, GSM marked its 20th anniversary. The digital cellular technology took mobile gadgets from the fashion and business elite and turned them into a ubiquitous communication tool.

Then the aviation wonder Airbus A380 finally flew in October after numerous design snags and production delays. Another key moment was the launch of iPhone: Apple Inc. claimed to have sold a million units in the first 74 days of launch.

At the system design level, DTV is among the key highlights. U.S. retailer Best Buy surprised many by pulling off analog TV sets from its stores ahead of a planned 2009 switch to digital. It is now selling only DTV tuners.

WiMAX networking products also started to get some traction this year with key product launches. In the computing front, Seagate and Samsung launched much-anticipated hard drives that are a fusion of disk storage and flash memory.

But if there's one technology that emerged as a clear winner, it's probably automotive electronics, especially the infotainment part of it. Automotive remained a stable pillar of growth at a time when consumer and wireless segments looked uncertain.

On a not-so-positive note, mobile TV projects found themselves struggling, which made some major chipmakers put development of mobile TV technologies on hold.

In the IC realm, we see mixed signals. In September, Toshiba announced that it had sold out its NAND flash memory chips until yearend. This statement came at a time when flash memory market had been slowing down with lower average selling prices.

On the semiconductor business side, Japan's IC industry seems ready for yet another shakeup. Sanyo is reported to be selling its semiconductor assets, while Sony is selling its chip operations to Toshiba. And big players like NEC and Renesas are moving toward the fab-lite strategy.

Regarding the future of the IC industry, the voices for CMOS replacement are getting louder as experts see the end of CMOS scaling in sight. New research initiatives are striving to extend Moore's Law beyond CMOS limits. At the recent Intel Development Forum in San Francisco, Gordon Moore was asked to comment on the future of Moore's Law. E said that we have another decade—maybe a decade and a half—until we hit some fundamental limit.

On the embedded design front, we are now seeing an inflection point with the fundamental shift in computing platforms from single processors to multicore architectures.

Overall, 2007 has been a mixed bag for the semiconductor industry. There have been the usual ups and downs in the commodity memory chip markets, and we saw a number of weak quarterly results from major companies.

On the brighter side, we are seeing some significant action in areas like intellectual property and new product architectures. And Asia remains a key destination in terms of semiconductor product shipments.

The crystal ball for 2008 seems to paint a more colorful picture. And the "Beijing effect" amid the upcoming Olympics could sure add some color for a brighter outlook for the electronics design industry in Asia.

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