High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) systems have been successfully used for some time now in the network switching and high-performance computing (HPC) spaces. Now, adding fuel to the HBM fire, there is another market that shares similar system requirements as HPC and that is Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially AI systems doing… Read More
ISS 2018 – The Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain
I was invited to give a talk at the ISS conference on the Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain. The ISS conference is an annual gathering of semiconductor executives to review technology and global trends. In this article I will walk through my presentation and conclusions.… Read More
Advanced ASICs – It Takes an Ecosystem
I remember the days of the IDM (integrated device manufacturer). For me, it was RCA, where I worked for 15 years as the company changed from RCA to GE and then ultimately to Harris Semiconductor. It’s a bit of a cliché, but life was simpler then, from a customer point of view at least. RCA did it all. We designed all the IP, did the physical… Read More
Choosing the lesser of 2 evils EUV vs Multi Patterning!
For Halloween this week we thought it would be appropriate to talk about things that strike fear into the hearts of semiconductor makers and process engineers toiling away in fabs. Do I want to do multi-patterning with the huge increase in complexity, number of steps, masks and tools or do I want to do EUV with unproven tools, unproven… Read More
Arm TechCon Preview with the Foundries!
This week Dr. Eric Esteve, Dr. Bernard Murphy, and I will be blogging live from Arm TechCon. It really looks like it will be a great conference so you should see some interesting blogs in the coming days. One of the topics I am interested in this year is foundation IP and I will tell you why.
During the fabless transformation of the semiconductor… Read More
Breakfast with Aart de Geus and the Foundries!
Being the number one EDA and the number one IP company does have its advantages and the resulting foundry relationships are a clear example. One of the DAC traditions that I truly enjoy is the Synopsys foundry breakfasts. Not only does Synopsys welcome scribes, they reserve a table up front for us and Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus has been… Read More
Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC
I’m a user of many Samsung products as my family has Samsung Galaxy smart phones and my MacBook Pro uses Samsung SSD for storage, so at DAC I attended a breakfast panel with presenters from Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm. This was the second day of DAC and they served us breakfast, and with the big names on the panel the room was… Read More
Semicon West – The FDSOI Ecosystem
At Semicon West last week I attended presentations by Soitec and CEA Leti, and had breakfast with CEA Leti CEO Marie Semeria, key members of the Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) ecosystem. I have also seen some comments in the SemiWiki forum lately that make me believe there is some confusion on the roles of different companies… Read More
Standard Node Trend
I have previously published analysis’ converting leading edge logic processes to “standard nodes” and comparing standard nodes by company and time. Recently updated details on the 7nm process node have become available and in this article, I will revisit the standard node calculations and trends.… Read More
3D NAND Myths and Realities
For many year 2D NAND drove lithography for the semiconductor industry with the smallest printed dimensions and yearly shrinks. As 2D NAND shrunk down to the mid-teens nodes, 16nm, 15nm and even 14nm, the cells became so small that there were only a few electrons in each cell and cross-talk issues made further shrinks very difficult… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography