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It’s amazing how these rumors start and go viral. People are literally laughing here in Taiwan. I remember I wrote something that I thought was obviously satire and less than a week later someone repeated it back to me as fact since they “read it on the internet somewhere.”
According to Bloomberg: Apple Inc. (AAPL) and Qualcomm Inc.… Read More
Reports out of Taiwan (I’m in Hsinchu this week) have TSMC more than doubling 28nm wafer output in Q3 2012 due to yield improvements and capacity increases while only spending $3.6B of the $8.5B forecasted CAPEX! Current estimates have TSMC 28nm capacity at 100,000 300mm wafers (+/- 10%) per month versus 25,000 wafers reported… Read More
A Brief History of FPGAsby Daniel Nenni on 08-26-2012 at 7:30 pmCategories: FPGA
From the transistor to the integrated circuit to the ASIC, next comes programmable logic devices on the road to the mainstream fabless semiconductor industry. PLDS started in the early 1970’s from the likes of Motorola, Texas Instruments, and IBM but it wasn’t until Xilinx brought us the field programmable gate array (FPGA)… Read More
Daniel Payne recently blogged some of the integration challenges facing Synopsys with their impending acquisition of SpringSoft. On my way back from San Diego last week I stopped by Tanner EDA to discuss an alternative tool flow for users who find themselves concerned about the Laker Custom Layout road map.
Design of the analog… Read More
A Brief History of SoCsby Daniel Nenni on 08-19-2012 at 10:00 amCategories: EDA
Interesting to note; our cell phones today have more computing power than NASA had for the first landing on the moon. The insides of these mobile devices that we can’t live without are not like personal computers or even laptops with a traditional CPU (central processing unit) and a dozen other support chips. The brain, heart, and… Read More
Now that the mobile market is keeping us all employed, take a close look at what is actually inside those devices we can’t live without. Before SoCs you could just read the codes on the chips. Now it is all Semiconductor IP so you have to do a little more diligence to find out what is really powering your phones and tablets. One thing you… Read More
It is important to note that the System On Chip (SoC) revolution that is currently driving mobile electronics has one very important enabling technology and that is Semiconductor Intellectual Property. Where would we be without the $6B+ commercial semiconductor IP market segment? Computers and phones would still be on our desks… Read More
From the very start I continually asked the GF guys what their value proposition is other than, “We are not TSMC”, which seems to be the easy way to foundry riches but clearly is not. In the early days of GF there was a lot of pride, pomp, and circumstance but that does not necessarily sell wafers. Today we are seeing a very different GF … Read More
One area of the Semiconductor Market that has continued to see start-up venture investment is emerging memories. There is always a perception and need to discover a memory that can either displace the current technologies or create a new niche between DRAM and Flash. Adesto Technologies was founded in 2007 to explore and commercialize… Read More
As a fitting postscript to my “Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Industry”, semiconductor research company IC Insights compiled a list of the top semiconductor companies for the first half of 2012. As the traditional IDMs go fabless and sink in the ratings, the foundries post record gains led by TSMC at 22%, GlobalFoundries… Read More
Huawei’s and SMIC’s Requirement for 5nm Production: Improving Multipatterning Productivity