Bill Gross, founder and co-chief investment officer of PIMCO, the world’s largest Bond Fund, recently declared, “We’re Witnessing the Death of Equities.” Contrarians should take note as Gross made a similar calling 10 days before the previous major stock market bottom on March 9[SUP]th[/SUP] 2009. For Entrepreneurs and Venture… Read More
SemiWiki.com Analytics Exposed 2012
About 4 years ago some of my semiconductor cohorts urged me to blog. “Hey Dan, you’re a funny guy, write about EDA and IP, make us laugh!” Of course what I think is funny most people think is snarky, which is a nice word for being a smart ass. The traditional semiconductor press was crumbling, the non traditional EDA websites were outdated,… Read More
The Future of Lithography and the End of Moore’s Law!
Thisblog with a chart showing that the cost of given functionality on a chip is no longer going to fall is, I think, one of the most-read I’ve ever written on Semiwiki. It is actually derived from data nVidia presented about TSMC, so at some level perhaps it is two alpha males circling each other preparing for a fight. Or, in this… Read More
Media Tablet Strategy from Google and Microsoft: illusion about the effective protection of NDAs…
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


PDF Solutions Charts a Course for the Future at Its User Conference and Analyst Day