In the face of shrinking time-to-market windows, semiconductor companies are aggressively vying with each other to emerge with new or variants of existing ICs and SoCs to gain market share. The growth of the mobile market –wireless, networking, storage, and computing – as well as new areas such as the Internet of things (IoT) and… Read More
Author: Daniel Nenni
The EDA Ice Bucket Challenge Just Got Real!
Raising four children is no easy task, believe me. My beautiful wife and I always felt it was important to foster the charitable side of our children by volunteering at the food bank, cleaning up local waterways, and other activities we could do as a family. To be clear, that is why my family did the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.
“It is amazing… Read More
Kilopass v. Sidense Update!
It looks like Sidense finally has closure on their request for attorney fees. Generally, in the U.S., parties in a lawsuit pay for their respective attorney fees which can be staggering. However, U.S. law allows the courts to shift the payment of the winner’s attorney fees to the losing party for “exceptional” reasons. Based on … Read More
EDA Ice Bucket Challenge!
In case you have not heard, the Ice Bucket Challenge is a social media program aiming to increase the awareness of ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis AKA Lou Gehrig’s Disease). One of our neighbors recently passed away as a result of ALS so this challenge is dedicated to Barbara Letts. After hearing about the challenge my daughter… Read More
Intel 14nm is NOT in Production Yet!
Okay, maybe I’m the only one questioning Intel 14nm yield but I think it will be an interesting discussion in the comments section. Here are the questions I would have asked Intel during their recent 14nm PR tour: Has the P1272 process been rolled out to the production fabs in OR, AZ, and Ireland? Is the process officially in production… Read More
Who will Manufacture Apple’s Next SoC?
Just to review: The brain inside the current Apple iPhone 5s is the A7 SoC manufactured by Samsung using a 28nm process. The A6 (iPhone 5) and A5 (iPhone 4s) are based on Samsung 32nm. The rest of the Apple SoCs also used Samsung processes. I think we can all now agree that the coming Apple A8 SoC (iPhone 6) will use the TSMC 20nm process.… Read More
Will Intel Have a Bigger FinFET Market Share Than TSMC in 2015?
Speculation is running rampant after last month’s conference call where Dr. Morris Chang, who is often referred to as “The Chairman”, commented that at 16nm TSMC will have a smaller market share than a major competitor in 2015. TSMC will however regain the FinFET lead in 2016 and 2017. Of course the blogosphere went crazy on this … Read More
Altera vs Xilinx FinFET Update
One of the things I do in my spare time is listen to quarterly conference calls and try to sort fact from fiction. I compare past calls to the current one and attempt to predict what’s coming next. Confucius said, “Study the past if you would define the future” and I’m a big believer in that.
Paul McLellan wrote about the Xilinx call earlier… Read More
Getting a Tapeout Quote in 10 Minutes!
On Thursday, July 31[SUP]st[/SUP] at 8 AM Pacific Daylight Time I’ll be moderating a webinar that will demo eSilicon’s new GDSII quoting portal. You can find more details about the webinar here, and you can register here.
I’ve worked with a lot of companies that do advanced custom IC designs. Getting a quote that covers all the NRE… Read More
Clever IoT Devices are Coming!
Paul McLellan and I spent the evening with Samsung at the Bentley Reserve in San Francisco last night. One thing I discussed with them in great detail was IoT devices. Samsung is investing heavily in IoT and the supporting infrastructure. In fact, there is a rumor that Samsung is acquiring home automation company SmartThings for… Read More









Semidynamics Unveils 3nm AI Inference Silicon and Full-Stack Systems