The USA has very good culture of demonstrating new innovations in every industry by way of conferences, exhibitions, workshops, large meetings and so on. The Consumer Electronic Show (CES) is one of its kinds which exhibit new electronic products that tell about which way the industry is heading. Electronic products are final… Read More
Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools
The first consumer products with 20nm processing are arriving in 2014 like the 2 billion transistor A8 chip in the iPhone 6, however at the 14nm node there are new designs underway to continue the trend of Moore’s Law. To get a better feel for the challenges of designing with 14nm FinFET technology I watched a 23 minute video … Read More
Clever IoT Devices are Coming!
Paul McLellan and I spent the evening with Samsung at the Bentley Reserve in San Francisco last night. One thing I discussed with them in great detail was IoT devices. Samsung is investing heavily in IoT and the supporting infrastructure. In fact, there is a rumor that Samsung is acquiring home automation company SmartThings for… Read More
Samsung Foundry Explained!
Rather than watch the World Cup battle for third place, my beautiful wife and I spent last Saturday afternoon at the CASPA Wearables Symposium. The most interesting presentation was from Samsung because it included slides on their foundry offering. In regards to wearables, I still don’t see the ROI I need to buy one, yet. We are getting… Read More
Samsung Voice of the Body
I just back from Samsung’s big announcement held at the SFJazz center (very conveniently 15 minutes walk from my place). They put a stake in the ground about their program at the intersection of medicine and health and technology. They had said in advance that they would not announce any new hardware but in fact they did…although… Read More
Samsung Endorses FD-SOI!
This is probably one of the biggest stories we will cover this month, if not this year, absolutely. In partnership with STMicroelectronics, Samsung will manufacture 28nm FD-SOI chips for the fabless semiconductor community starting now. This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Samsung is serious about the foundry business.… Read More
Can Intel Catch Samsung? Can Anybody Catch Samsung?
As a professional conference attendee I see a lot of keynotes, some good and some bad. I saw a great one from Kurt Shuler at the SEMICO IP Impact Conference last week. Why this conference was not standing room only I do not know. Kurt’s characterization of the semiconductor industry was well worth the price of admission. I didn’t actually… Read More
ARM in Samsung 14nm FinFET
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
Samsung 28nm Beats Intel 22nm!
There was some serious backlash to the “Intel Bay Trail Fail” blog I posted last week, mostly personal attacks by the spoon fed Intel faithful, but there are however some very interesting points made amongst the 30+ comments so be sure and read them when you have a chance.
The Business insider article “The iPhone… Read More
Enabling 14nm FinFET Design
There’s never a dull moment in the foundry race to offer FinFET processes that enable leading-edge SoC design. Today I attended a webinar hosted by Samsung and Synopsys on how to enable 14nm FinFET design. The two speakers were Dr. Kuang-Kuo Lin from Samsung and Dr. Henry Sheng from Synopsys.
Dr. Kuang-Kuo Lin, Samsung
Dr.… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot