TSMC continues to drive the economic recovery with impressive Q1 numbers and an even more impressive Q2 and Q3 outlook. TSMC is my economic bellwether due to its diverse customer base and shear volume of consumer electronics silicon. The big surprise in the 1 hour Q1 conference call is a new Giga Fab (#15) ground breaking this year… Read More
Author: Daniel Nenni
Semiconductor Industry Security Threat!
The IBM X-ForceTrend and Risk Report reveals how 2010 was a pivotal year for internet security as networks faced increasingly sophisticated attacks from malicious sources around the world. The X-Force reportedly monitors 13 billion real-time security events every day (150,000 events per second) and has seen an increase in … Read More
2011: A Semiconductor Odyssey!
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey showed us a world where machine vision allowed a computer to watch and interact with its human colleagues. Yet after 40 years of incredible progress in semiconductor design, the technology to make computer-based image and video analysis a reality is still not practical.
While working with… Read More
AMD and GlobalFoundries / TI and UMC
There have been some significant foundry announcements recently that if collated will give you a glimpse into the future of the semiconductor industry. So let me do that for you here.
First the candid EETimes article about TI dumping Samsung as a foundry:
Taiwan’s UMC will take the ”lead role’’ in making the OMAP 5 device on… Read More
Samsung is NOT a Foundry!
Samsung is the #1 electronics company, the #2 semiconductor company, and for 20+ years the world’s largest memory chip maker. Analysts expect Samsung to catch Intel by the year 2014. In the foundry business however Samsung is a distant #9 after more than a five year investment and here’s why:
Foundry 2010 Revenue:
(1) TSMC $13B
(2)… Read More
2011 Semiconductor Design Forecast: Partly Cloudy!
This was my first SNUG (Synopsys User Group) meeting as media so it was a ground breaking event. Media was still barred from some of the sessions but hey, it’s a start. The most blog worthy announcement on day 1 was that Synopsys signed a deal with Amazon to bring the cloud to mainstream EDA!
Even more blog worthy was a media roundtable… Read More
Moore’s Law and Semiconductor Design and Manufacturing
The semiconductor design and manufacturing challenges at 40nm and 28nm are a direct result ofMoore’s Law, the climbing transistor count and shrinking geometries. It’s a process AND design issue and the interaction is at the transistor level. Transistors may be shrinking, but atoms aren’t. So now it actually matters when even… Read More
TSMC 2011 Technology Symposium Theme Explained
The 17[SUP]th[/SUP] Annual TSMC Technology Symposium will be held in San Jose California on April 5[SUP]th[/SUP], 2011. Dr. Morris Chang will again be the keynote speaker. The theme this year is “Trusted Technology and Capacity Provider”and I think it’s important to not only hear what people are saying but also understand why… Read More
Mentor Graphics 1 : Carl Icahn 0!
This is just another blog about Carl Icahn and his quest to conquer EDA, when in fact EDA is conquering him. It includes highlights from my dinner with Mentor Graphics and Physicist Brian Greene, the Mentor Q4 conference call, and meeting Mentor CEO Wally Rhines at DvCon 2011.
It wasn’t just the free food this time, dinner with Brian… Read More
Semiconductor Power Crisis and TSMC!
Power grids all over the world are already overloaded even without the slew of new electronic gadgets and cars coming out this year. At ISSCC, Dr. Jack Sun, TSMC Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer made the comparison of a human brain to the closest thing available in silicon, a graphical processing unit (GPU).… Read More
Unlocking the cloud: A new era for post-tapeout flow for semiconductor manufacturing