A �media center� could be an integral part of every home by 2015. But movies on demand need a willing Hollywood and a super-PVR -- In a recent interview with Japanese web site TechOn, Star Wars director George Lucas discussed the impact of digital movie-making on cinema and touched on the rise of home entertainment servers in the digital home. Lucas is an unabashed devotee of digital film and digital projection � the second Star Wars prequel, Attack of the Clones, was the first movie to be shot entirely using a high-definition 24fps digital camera, Sony�s HDW-F900. The creator of that galaxy far, far away sees a digital future where more Hollywood movies will be shot in this way, more filmmakers will get their work shown and movies will be distributed over the Internet. �I'm not sure how it will actually play out,� Lucas is quoted as saying, �but it seems to be something like the same day and date of a movie being released in a movie theatre, you can also get it over the Internet.� �I think eventually [Internet distribution] will be the future of Hollywood,� Lucas said in another interview, this time with US news channel CNBC. But like many industry observers, he is also realistic about this future happening any time soon.
Few technology sectors sit as close to the center of gravity in today's artificial intelligence (AI) economy as semiconductor manufacturing. Every AI chip that trains a frontier model, every GPU that powers a data center inference workload, and every power management IC that keeps hyperscaler facilities running traces its origins back to the global Foundry ecosystem. IDC's latest market study throws that reality into sharp relief, projecting that the broadly defined Foundry 2.0 market will surpass $360 billion in 2026, a 17 percent year-over-year gain that would have seemed optimistic even two years ago. For anyone advising boards or investment committees on technology and AI infrastructure strategy, this growth trajectory demands careful consideration. Foundry 2.0 Market Development The umbrella term covers four distinct verticals: pure-play foundry, non-memory integrated device manufacturer (IDM) production, outsourced semiconductor assembly and test (OSAT), and photomask fab...