Freescale and Samsung

Freescale and Samsung
by Paul McLellan on 02-17-2015 at 6:58 pm

It is impossible to keep a secret in this business. Everyone knows that Freescale is being shopped around and there is interest.

From Yahoo Finance:
The parties that Freescale is speaking to could not be learned. The New York Post first reported that Freescale was working with investment banks to explore a sale. Freescale sharesRead More


Mobile 2014 and the Future

Mobile 2014 and the Future
by Paul McLellan on 02-17-2015 at 7:00 am

The numbers are in now and so we can look at the top suppliers into the mobile market for 2014, and then a look out to what the future might bring. Before getting to the companies it is worth looking just how dominant the Chinese market is, at 32% of the entire world market compared to, for example, US’s 9%. China Mobile alone has … Read More


ARM 2014 Results: 12 Billion Cores

ARM 2014 Results: 12 Billion Cores
by Paul McLellan on 02-16-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week was the ARM earnings call, giving the Q4 results and a summary of 2014. 12B chips containing ARM processors were shipped last year which has meant that they have grown in all their major end-markets: mobile, embedded intelligence, and enterprise infrastructure. Almost half of those 12B chips were in mobile, around 5.6B.… Read More


AMAT Earnings Call: Next Generation FinFETs?

AMAT Earnings Call: Next Generation FinFETs?
by Paul McLellan on 02-15-2015 at 9:00 am

The Applied Materials earnings call was last week. As usual I”m not all that interested in the financial details of the quarter and I’m certainly not the person to pick whether the stock is going to go up or down in the immediate future. However, there is always interesting information to be gleaned from the semiconductor… Read More


TSMC’s OIP: Everything You Need for 16FF+ SoCs

TSMC’s OIP: Everything You Need for 16FF+ SoCs
by Paul McLellan on 02-13-2015 at 7:00 am

Doing a modern SoC design is all about assembling IP and adding a small amount of unique IC design for differentiation (plus, usually, lots of software). If you re designing in a mature process then there is not a lot of difficulty finding IP for almost anything. But if you are designing in a process that has not yet reached high-volume… Read More


SEMI ISS: Samsung, the Keynote That Wasn’t

SEMI ISS: Samsung, the Keynote That Wasn’t
by Paul McLellan on 02-12-2015 at 7:00 am

At the SEMI International Strategy Symposium last month, one of the keynotes was by Jim Elliot, the CVP of Memory Marketing for Samsung. Unfortunately, due to some personal emergency, he wasn’t able to make it. But he did allow the slides of the presentation he would have given to be put up on the SEMI website. So here, for the… Read More


Using NoCs to Reduce Power

Using NoCs to Reduce Power
by Paul McLellan on 02-11-2015 at 7:00 am

Earlier this week I moderated a webinar at Sonics entitled NoC 102: Using SonicsGN to Address Low Power Requirements. Drew Wingard, the CTO of Sonics, presented it. It goes without saying that power is a major concern in SoC design, not just with chips for battery powered devices but also tethered devices. A major cost of ownership… Read More


Chips Are Going 3D, DRC Needs to Go 3D Too

Chips Are Going 3D, DRC Needs to Go 3D Too
by Paul McLellan on 02-10-2015 at 7:00 am

The last paradigm shift in DRC was around 0.35um when designs got too large to handle as flat data, and hierarchical approaches were required. Back then the design rules themselves were not that complex, the explosion of data volume came from the complexity of the design itself. But each process node added more design rules intricacies… Read More


FD-SOI at Samsung

FD-SOI at Samsung
by Paul McLellan on 02-08-2015 at 7:00 am

Various foundries have made announcements about licensing FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics and then fallen quiet. GlobalFoundries made an announcement a couple of years ago. Samsung made an announcement just before DAC last year. But neither company has said anything much since. Of course the big noise at 14/16nm… Read More


Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?

Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?
by Paul McLellan on 02-06-2015 at 7:00 am

I sat down this afternoon with Peter Theunis, the CTO of Methodics. Conveniently their office is about a 15 minute walk from where I live so we could chat face to face.

Peter started programming when he was 8 and his first “product” was a weather system for orchards where sensors in the orchards would send information … Read More