Intel Second Quarter Results

Intel Second Quarter Results
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 4:03 pm

Intel announced their quarterly results earlier this week. Their mainline microprocessor business is doing well, especially the highest performance segments for servers, datacenters and cloud computing. Broken down by segment the numbers come out like this:

  • PC Client Group revenue of $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially
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Andes Plays an ACE

Andes Plays an ACE
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 9:01 am

There is a perception that ARM is the only microprocessor game in town due to their strong position in many markets, especially mobile. In areas where the instruction set shows through, then this is probably true. There is no rush to build smartphones where the application processor is something else. But even in a phone there are… Read More


Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction

Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 pm

Today Cadence announced their next generation extraction solution called Quantus QRC. Actually they are technically announcing it tomorrow, since it is being announced at CDNLive in Korea where it is already Tuesday morning.

As with the other recently announced tools that end in -us, Tempus (timing signoff) and Voltus (power… Read More


EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest

EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 am

All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More


Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring

Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
by Paul McLellan on 07-12-2014 at 11:00 am

To wrap up Semicon West, let’s go back to Monday and the imec presentations. In fact, An Steegen’s presentation titled The Semiconductor Roadmap. She covered a lot of ground, but some of her slides contain a wealth of information. Let’s look at the options for 10nm, 7nm and a little 5nm, what imec call N10, N7 and… Read More


GlobalFoundries: Upcoming Events

GlobalFoundries: Upcoming Events
by Paul McLellan on 07-11-2014 at 9:01 am

GlobalFoundries is running a series of technical seminars in the US and Europe, following on from the successful versions run last month in Shanghai and Hsinchu. Among the topics that will be discussed are Foundry 2.0 and Collaborative Device Manufacturing for both Leading Edge and Mainstream technologies. The European events… Read More


Bob Metcalfe Keynote at #semiconwest

Bob Metcalfe Keynote at #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-10-2014 at 9:00 am

My PhD is in distributed file systems so one of the key networking papers was Metcalfe and Boggs, 1976. It was titled Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks. This was the paper that introduced the world to Ethernet and to Bob Metcalfe. He was on stage yesterday here at Semicon West to give the afternoon… Read More


Mark Adams Keynote at #semiconwest

Mark Adams Keynote at #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-09-2014 at 12:58 pm

The first surprise of the opening keynote for Semicon West was on the slides that were cycling on the screen as the room filled up. Somehow our book Fabless had managed to be in the rotation.

The opening keynote was by Mark Adams, the President of Micron. He was talking about upcoming big changes in the semiconductor environment, although… Read More


IMEC Technology Symposium

IMEC Technology Symposium
by Paul McLellan on 07-08-2014 at 12:52 pm

Yesterday I attended the IMEC Technology Forum at Semicon West. As always with IMEC, they present so much information it is like drinking from a firehose. I’ll say more about the future of process technology in a blog later this week, but this blog is about IMEC itself. It is an amazing success story. Let’s face it, if you were going … Read More


Sonics and Qualcomm Make a Deal

Sonics and Qualcomm Make a Deal
by Paul McLellan on 07-06-2014 at 9:00 am

Some background. Sonics has been in the network-on-chip (NoC) business for a long time. Nearly 18 years years. When Arteris launched their products, Sonics figured Arteris were infringing Sonics’s patents and in 2011 brought a complaint against them. Details are here. Arteris looked at a couple of their own patents (if… Read More