Extracted from an interesting article from Jeff Orr from ABI research, “We have all heard about leaked company roadmaps that detail a vendor’s product or service plans for the next year or two. Typically, putting one’s plans down in advance of public announcement has two intended audiences: customers who rely on … Read More
EUV: No Pellicle
There’s a dirty secret problem about EUV that people don’t seem to to be talking about. There’s no pellicle on a EUV mask. OK, probably you have no idea what that means, a lot of jargon words, nor why it would be important, but it seems to me it could be the killer problem for EUV.
In refractive masks, you print a pattern… Read More
Higgs bosons, (un)certainty, and black holes
Ever since the announcement in early July from CERN that they likely have, probably, finally found the Higgs boson, I’ve been thinking about what quantum mechanics means to our daily ‘classical model’ existence. On the surface, nothing. The most fantastical aspects of quantum mechanics, like uncertainty, tunneling and the … Read More
Qualcomm’s Moment to Re-Align Globally
Qualcomm has a nice problem to have: too much demand for its Snapdragon and 4G LTE baseband parts. How Qualcomm realigns its manufacturing strategy around this problem will determine whether or not they can breakaway from the ARM camp and go toe to toe with Intel. Last week Malcolm Penn claimed TSMC was too big to fail. Really? The … Read More
Nokia: the Epic Version
Whenever I write about the handset industry, lots of people seem to be interested. As I’ve said before, my go to person for the industry but especially for Nokia, is Tomi Ahonen. He has written a long (and I mean long, it is nearly 30,000 words) indictment of Elop’s tenure at Nokia and how he has destroyed one of the most … Read More
Minitel Shuts Down
When I first came to the US, one project that we had going on at VLSI Technology was an ASIC design being done by a French company called Telic. The chip would go into something called “Minitel” which the France Telecom (actually still the PTT since post and telecomunications had not yet been separated) planned to supply… Read More
Crushed Blackberry
I wasn’t going to write about the cell phone business again for some time. After all, this is a site about semiconductor and EDA primarily. But the cell-phone business in all its facets is a huge semiconductor consumer and continues to grow fast (despite my morbid focus on those companies that do anything but).
But Research… Read More
The Scariest Graph I’ve Seen Recently
Everyone knows Moore’s Law: the number of transistors on a chip doubles every couple of years. We can take the process roadmap for Intel, TSMC or GF and pretty much see what the densities we will get will be when 20/22nm, 14nm and 10nm arrive. Yes the numbers are on track.
But I have always pointed out that this is not what drives… Read More
Microsoft Messes Up Mobile Even More…and Already Went Thermonuclear
Ed wrote recently about Microsoft going thermonuclear. I think that they already did. Ed wrote about Microsoft’s tablet announcement. The second announcement is a sort of follow up to my blog on what will happen to Nokia.
Two big announcements, the first one is that Microsoft is going to produce its own tablet computers (MiPads … Read More
Off topic: Matt
This has pretty much nothing to do with EDA or semiconductor. OK, absolutely nothing. Years ago a friend pointed me at a video of a guy who used to be a video game designer (wait, a semiconductor connection) who decided to take his savings and travel the world. As he put it, “I wasn’t a very good video game designer. But I … Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption