When sketching out the chapters for our book “Mobile UnLeashed” we sought out the events and technology that empowered the mobile devices that literally changed our world. One of the companies that enabled this change of course is Samsung. Cleverly embedded in chapter 8 “To Seoul, via Austin” is the story of how Samsung got into … Read More
FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More
Why Medical IoT is Set to Take Off!
In a recent SemiWiki post, “Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off,” the author raised some very interesting points on why certain IoT applications won’t succeed. But, it’s important that these points are looked at holistically, within context, and compared to other IoT features that are already improving health by increasing… Read More
IEDM Blogs – Part 3 – Global Foundries 22FDX Briefing
While I was at IEDM I had an opportunity to sit down with Subramani (Subi) Kengeri, the Vice President, General Management, CMOS Platforms Business Unit and Jason Gorss from corporate marketing at Global Foundries (GF) for a briefing on GF’s new 22FDX process technology.
Subi told me his background was in design but that he is now… Read More
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant
In part one of this blog I described a visit to GlobalFoundries (GF) Fab 8 site in Malta New York by Daniel Nenni and myself. In this part 2 of the blog, I will describe the second day of our trip when we visited Fab 9 in Burlington Vermont. Before we got to Burlington I thought it would likely be a letdown after seeing the state-of-the-art… Read More
What do Rockets and GF Fab 8 Have in Common?
An interesting thing happened during the driving tour of the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Malta, NY. We happened by an old structure with quite a bit of history. As it turns out, the “Malta Test Station”, a former US Army fuel and explosives testing facility, was the actual birthplace of the United States’ Space & Missile programs.… Read More
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution
Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More
GlobalFoundries 14nm Process Update
Last Monday Daniel Nenni and I had a conference call with Jason Gorss and Shubhankar Basu of Global Foundries to get an update on their 14nm process. Shubhankar is the product line manager for 14nm.
Global Foundries 14nm process is a FinFET on bulk process they licensed from Samsung and both companies supply the same process although… Read More
How LETI IP will speed-up GlobalFoundries 22FDX™ ASIC Development
GlobalFoundries has positioned FDSOI proposal -22FDX- to provide better performance and power dissipation than competitive FDSOI offers on 28nm node. The FDSOI licensing agreement between LETI and GlobalFoundries is only a couple of months old (July 2015), but the real work has started in Dresden as several engineers from … Read More
How GlobalFoundries’ CTO Nearly Became a Lawyer…Called Funkhauser
I sat down for a chat with Gary Patton, the CTO of GlobalFoundries, at today’s SEMI Strategic Materials Conference where he had just given one of the keynotes (which I’ll cover another time). His family name isn’t really Patton, his grandfather’s name was Funkhauser, but his step-grandfather’s… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay