SEMI sets SEMICON West 2026 program around the industry's $1 trillion revenue milestone

SEMI announced the full keynote and program lineup for SEMICON West 2026 on 27 August 2026, with the event running 13-15 October at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.^[1] The organizing theme is "Transform Tomorrow," and the program is explicitly structured around the semiconductor industry crossing $1 trillion in annual revenue - a threshold that analysts at TechInsights say arrived roughly four years ahead of earlier projections, driven almost entirely by AI demand.

What the $1 trillion milestone means for the program

SEMI Americas president Joe Stockunas framed the milestone as evidence of "remarkable demand" that also "presents new challenges the industry must tackle together." The 2026 program is designed to celebrate the achievement while "strategizing for the $2 trillion and beyond future," with sessions addressing how the industry scales beyond traditional Moore's Law and expands U.S. manufacturing infrastructure.

Global semiconductor revenue reached $298.5 billion in Q1 2026 alone, up 25% from the prior quarter, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. IDC projects full-year 2026 revenue at $1.29 trillion, up 52.8% year over year from $842.8 billion in 2025.

Design and EDA get a dedicated track

For readers focused on chip design and EDA, the most relevant addition to the 2026 agenda is a structured Design forum alongside the broader technical program. Focused forums will cover Design, Cybersecurity, Smart Manufacturing, Smart Mobility, and Sustainability, with technical tracks including the Test Vision Symposium and the Advanced Packaging and Heterogeneous Integration (APHI) Summit.

A session titled "Bridging Design and Manufacturing with AI" will bring together design houses, foundries, systems companies, and equipment makers to present new strategies on how AI can enable bespoke design and shorten design-to-silicon cycles. NVIDIA's keynote, titled "The Next Generation of Chips Starts With AI," will be presented by Tim Costa, General Manager of Industrial and Computational Engineering, focusing on how AI-driven supercomputing is transforming the future of chip design.

Synopsys president and CEO Sassine Ghazi is confirmed for a CEO Summit fireside chat hosted by Semiconductor Engineering editor-in-chief Ed Sperling.

What the technical sessions cover

Technical programs include the APHI Summit, the Test Vision Symposium, and the Materials and Advanced Substrates track, alongside future technology sessions covering AI computing, quantum computing, photonics, flexible hybrid electronics, and smart MedTech.

The agenda topics most relevant to design and EDA practitioners are:

• Advanced packaging and heterogeneous integration, including chiplet architectures and 2.5D/3D design
• AI-driven design-to-silicon flows and design-manufacturing co-optimization
• Signal integrity, power delivery, and thermal management in advanced packages
• Test strategy for chiplet-based systems
• Quantum computing and next-generation photonics outlooks

More than 734 companies exhibit at SEMICON West each year; this year's show is expected to feature more than 1,500 booths and draw over 35,000 attendees.

The session to watch most closely is the APHI Summit, where the gap between chiplet design intent and packaging process reality has been the sharpest point of industry friction in 2026. Whether the program produces concrete movement on interoperability standards - or remains a showcase of competing proprietary approaches - will be the clearest signal of where the industry actually stands on heterogeneous integration at scale.