Due to the high level of competition within the semiconductor industry, companies are looking to identify potential advantages in their manufacturing processes. This paper attempts to discover when it is more cost effective to disaggregate die versus maintaining a monolithic production process. Additionally, it will examine the current conditions of the market and how the results yielded from the research could be applied most effectively. Company X needs to maintain the same or more cores on their processors to stay ahead of their competition. This means that more surface area is needed on the silicon die, encouraging the change to die disaggregation and advanced packaging solutions. In the paper, we will first provide an analysis and go through our two cost equations for monolithic and disaggregated die. We will then break down each part of our cost equations and each variable that goes into it by doing a sensitivity analysis. The sensitivity analysis will give us some insight into which variables are affecting our cost equation the most, and thus which variables Company X should pay the most attention to while deciding whether or not to continue to use the monolithic die or move to the disaggregated process. Based on our findings we came to the conclusion that Company X should continue to utilize a monolithic die for all mobile products. However, all desktop and server products should start to consider utilizing a disaggregated die on a case by case basis while examining the specific factors in the cost equation.

For our collaborative thesis we explored the US electric utility market and how the Internet of Things technology movement could capture a possible advancement of the current existing grid. Our objective of this project was to successfully understand the market trends in the utility space and identify where a semiconductor manufacturing company, with a focus on IoT technology, could penetrate the market using their products. The methodology used for our research was to conduct industry interviews to formulate common trends in the utility and industrial hardware manufacturer industries. From there, we composed various strategies that The Company should explore. These strategies were backed up using qualitative reasoning and forecasted discounted cash flow and net present value analysis. We confirmed that The Company should use specific silicon microprocessors and microcontrollers that pertained to each of the four devices analytics demand. Along with a silicon strategy, our group believes that there is a strong argument for a data analytics software package by forming strategic partnerships in this space.