On September 20th GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) held their annual technology conference. The conference presented an opportunity to hear the latest on the fascinating journey GF has been on.… Read More
This is a Different GLOBALFOUNDRIES!
Having followed GF since its inception, I agree with CTO Gary Patton, what we are seeing today truly is a different GLOBALFOUNDRIES! Our first GF blog was published on 9/13/2009 and we have done a total of 173 GF related blogs that have collected more than 1.5M views thus far. 72 of those blogs were written by me so I have followed this… 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
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
Exclusive – GLOBALFOUNDRIES discloses 7nm process detail
In a SemiWiki EXCLUSIVE – GLOBALFOUNDRIES has now disclosed the key metrics for their 7nm process. As I previously discussed in my 14nm, 16nm, 10nm and 7nm – What we know now blog GLOBALFOUNDRIES licensed their 14nm process from Samsung and decided to skip 10nm because they thought it would be a short-lived node. At … Read More
GlobalFoundries 7nm and EUV Update!
Scott Jones and I had the opportunity to talk again with Gary Patton, GlobalFoundries CTO and SVP of R&D for a quick update on 7nm and EUV. Gary has been at GF for two years now with more than 500 other technologists from the IBM semiconductor acquisition. 7nm is the first IBM based process from GF (14nm was licensed from Samsung),… Read More
$100M China Investment for FD-SOI Ecosystem!
When GlobalFoundries first briefed me on 22FDX during a trip to Dresden in 2015, China was one of the first things that came to mind. The China semiconductor market was still on 28nm and FinFETs seemed far away for the majority of the Chinese fabless companies. A low cost, low power, low complexity 22nm process with a path to 12nm (12FDX)… Read More
14nm 16nm 10nm and 7nm – What we know now
Last week Intel held a manufacturing day where they revealed a lot of information about their 10nm process for the first time and information on competitor processes continues to slowly come out as well. I thought it would be useful to summarize what we know now, especially since some of what Intel announced was different than what… Read More
Shootout at 22nm!
For an industry that drives improvement at an exponential rate it is funny how often something old is new again. Intel went into high volume production on 22nm in 2011, and TSMC and Samsung have both had 20nm technologies in production for several years. And yet, recently we have seen renewed interest in 22nm. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has… Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment