You have to love when a professional journalist leaks a story and cites a “source close to the acquisition.” News flash: Anyone “close” to the acquisition is under NDA which is a legally binding agreement, not very professional if you ask me. Bloggers however can write whatever they want but since I was actually “close” to … Read More
Author: Daniel Nenni
Is Cadence the Best EDA Company to Work for?
Apparently that is the case. Honestly my choice would have been Mentor but I can easily make an argument for Cadence based on my discussions with the foundries and their top customers but more on that later.
Fortune Magazine last week added Cadence to the 2015 list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” citing a cultural transformation… Read More
CDN is Live in Silicon Valley!
As big of a fan as I am of Social Media there is still nothing like getting up close and personal when collaborating with the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. After 30+ years in Silicon Valley if there is one thing I have learned it’s that “showing up” is the #1 key to success, absolutely.
Speaking of showing up, each year there are three… Read More
Sonics vs Arteris Lawsuit Update!
As strange as it may seem one of my hobbies is reading case law. It’s not only interesting to see what the human race is really up to, it is also good to know your rights in regards to things like defamation, especially when you are a New Media mogul like myself. Some of the funnier defamation cases are called “Twibel” as in libel on Twitter.… Read More
Samsung 14nm IS in Production!
There is quite a debate raging on whether Samsung Foundry is truly in production at 14nm. The word amongst the fabless semiconductor ecosystem is yes and this comes from two very large fabless companies that are reportedly using Samsung for 14nm and have even started looking at Samsung 10nm. Of course you can Google for stories by… Read More
Advantages when Designing with FD-SOI
In total we have blogged 41 times about FD-SOI on SemiWiki which has drawn an audience of 202,960 thus far. Of that traffic 31.68% came directly to SemiWiki (Newsletter), 30.13% came from search, 26.17% from social media (LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, etc…), and 11.99% came from other referring sites. The most… Read More
Synchronizer Optimization 101
A webinar presented Last week introduced two free aids to evaluating synchronizer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). The first, MetaACE LTD, is used to characterize the intrinsic parameters needed to calculate MTBF (tau and Tw). This limited version of MetaACE supports up to 250 circuit nodes, which is enough for a typical C-only-extracted… Read More
TSMC 20nm Essentially Worthless?
It happens at every process node, professional journalists write that something is broken and blames TSMC like a worn out record. To be fair they are not semiconductor professionals with access to the fabless semiconductor rank and file and are easily manipulated which is what happened again at 20nm. Remember when NVIDIA suggested… Read More
Do You Need a Silicon Catalyst?
Lately there has been significant concern over the rising costs of designing in silicon and the troubling decline in venture investments in semiconductors. These alarming trends include fewer IPOs, a falloff in the amount and frequency of early stage seed investments, and comparatively low industry organic growth rates. A … Read More
TSMC vs Samsung!
One of the trending topics in Taiwan last week is the escalating conflict between Samsung and TSMC. This time however it is of a legal nature which has been a long time coming for the semiconductor industry. Reverse engineering has been an integral part of the semiconductor business since the beginning, as has intellectual property… Read More









TSMC vs Intel Foundry vs Samsung Foundry 2026