Innovation in action

01:00:01:04 - 01:00:22:05

Ryan McCormack (Invesco QQQ)

It's a little surprising at times when you take a step back and look at all the devices in your home that are connected to the Internet. The ability of what we can do with these devices is now unfathomable compared to ten or 20 years ago. And ultimately, it all sort of comes back to the driving force behind a lot of these components, and that would be semiconductors.

01:00:26:19 - 01:00:46:05

Ryan McCormack (Invesco QQQ)

What is QQQ? An excellent question. We like to joke here that it belongs on the Mount Rushmore of ETFs, because there's not many that can say that they have a 20-year live track record. What I find exciting is Invesco QQQ is empowering investors to become agents of innovation, across industries, across companies that are shaping the way that they live their daily lives.

01:00:46:11 - 01:00:52:00

Ryan McCormack (Invesco QQQ)

QQQ is very different in that it's based on a rock-solid partnership with Nasdaq.

01:00:52:00 - 01:01:14:23

Karen Snow (Nasdaq)

The Nasdaq-100 is home to the biggest and most disruptive companies in tech. Semiconductors are really the brains behind all of the computing and innovation that we see across every sector. So they're really the heart of all of that innovation. I would say Microchip, KLA and Honeywell are all leaders as it relates to the semiconductor industry.

01:01:15:01 - 01:01:25:09

Vimal Kapur (Honeywell)

I don't think two decades back we had any electronics in our homes in form of semiconductor or in our cars. And today I'm not aware of any product where there’s no semiconductor.

01:01:25:15 - 01:01:45:05

Mark Shirey (KLA)

The end use of computer chips is so varied these days. You have huge data centers, you're managing our social networks and everything we do online. You have things like autonomous driving, electrification and increasing chip content in cars. You have smartphones, wearables.

01:01:45:09 - 01:02:07:12

Ganesh Moorthy (Microchip)

In the early years, making it smaller meant you were able to make it less expensive. You were able to get higher performance. Today, it's more important to also think about what kind of functionality can you pack into it, so that you can have a single chip or a small set of chips that are able to provide the type of functionality, the type of innovation you need without only thinking about performance and power.

01:02:07:22 - 01:02:27:14

Vimal Kapur (Honeywell)

Let's think of a phone we all used, from around 2005. Essentially, you could make a call on a little screen, but if you flip 15 years down the line, you won't even recognize that the phone looked like that. So, what has changed? It’s semiconductor because it gives much more optionality on what you can do with the compute power along with the software, the combination of that.

01:02:27:23 - 01:02:32:21

Ganesh Moorthy (Microchip)

And I think that's what semiconductors do and what Microchip products do. It's empowering that innovation.

01:02:33:13 - 01:02:41:22

Ryan McCormack (Invesco QQQ)

We say they're innovative because they really commit to long-term development of the various themes, right. They’re deep rooted in research and development.

01:02:42:04 - 01:02:57:19

Karen Snow (Nasdaq)

So, I don't think of this semiconductor industry in a linear way. I think of it very much as an ecosystem. And each one of the players contributing to that ecosystem. For Honeywell, for example, that can be in their approach to building and industrial automation.

01:02:58:08 - 01:03:19:13

Vimal Kapur (Honeywell)

If you see the buildings today versus how they looked many years back, you have face recognition as a primary means to recognize people and make them navigate through the office building or having new sensors for air quality — behind which is the semiconductor, which is enabling that technology. Across the board, semiconductors have impacted every segment in the last 5 to 10 years’ time.

01:03:19:18 - 01:03:43:04

Ganesh Moorthy (Microchip)

We make microchips. How about that, we’re done. What Microchip products do is make those products, through the innovation our customers do, into things that can be better or faster or less expensive. More features. Many of our customers are those who build circuit boards, which use semiconductors. Often they are selling to someone else who is assembling that into a system.

01:03:43:04 - 01:04:02:16

Ganesh Moorthy (Microchip)

And that system is being sold to an end consumer. You know, there's a part of what semiconductors have been doing on a consistent basis. Every year you bring out more functions, more features. The area of medical technology is one in which semiconductors have increasingly had more and more and more impact in terms of better outcomes that you have.

01:04:02:19 - 01:04:16:16

Ganesh Moorthy (Microchip)

Whether that is better outcomes in hospitals, where the big types of machinery are used for ultrasound and scanning and various other things, to all the things that are in the doctor's office, to what you do at home. All of those different things require semiconductors.

01:04:17:13 - 01:04:57:21

Mark Shirey (KLA)

What KLA and inspection and metrology brings is very high sensitivity inspection tools to detect tiny anomalies in the pattern, tiny pattern defects, tiny particles, all of which would kill a semiconductor chip. And that could mean one less smartphone can be delivered because that chip didn't work. As our customers shrink their devices, they introduce new materials, new processes. Every 12 to 24 months, we have upgrade our tools to serve those challenges. So it's really just continuous improvement and innovation to keep up with the semiconductor advancements.

01:04:58:05 - 01:05:20:10

Ryan McCormack (Invesco QQQ)

I think if you go four, five, ten, 20 years ago and asked, you know, where are we going to be? I mean, people can't really fathom the capabilities that we have at our fingertips. But, you know, ultimately, I think it's going to be driven by our desire as a society to be better connected. It's sort of, you know, one of these things where if you want to think big, then sometimes you need to start small.

01:05:23:20 - 01:05:33:07

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