In my career in semiconductor industry, I can recall, in the beginning there was emphasis on design completion with automation as fast as possible. The primary considerations were area and speed of completion of a semiconductor design. Today, with unprecedented increase in multiple functions on the same chip and density of the… 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
Atmel Licenses Mali and Security from ARM
Atmel (and ARM) announced yesterday that Atmel has licensed a portfolio of ARM IP for devices that require video, image and display capabilities. This portfolio includes Cortex-A7 (a 32-bit core), Mali-V500 (a video accelerator), Mali-DP500 (a display processor) and TrustZone technology (security technology). These can… Read More
The Two Biggest Misses in Mobile
There are some interesting parallels between Intel and Microsoft. Both of them missed mobile. Actually they didn’t completely miss mobile, both of them had programs from early days. But clearly they both regarded mobile as a much lower priority: the PC was where all the money was and where it would continue to be forever.… Read More
The Leading Edge Foundry Landscape
There have been a lot of interesting announcements and presentations lately from the leading edge foundries. Looking at all of this information, a pretty interesting picture begins to emerge.
TSMC
TSMC is far and away the world’s largest foundry. In their 2014-Q2 conference call TSMC outlined their expectations for the balance… Read More
Intel vs AMD
While listening to the Intel and AMD conference calls last week I was reminded of the ATI acquisition by AMD and the painfully long cultural assimilation that ensued. The title of this blog could just as easily have been “Custom vs Synthesizable Design Cultures” or “The Real Reason Why AMD is Fabless” because that is closer to how … 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
Intel Second Quarter Results
Intel announced their quarterly results earlier this week. Their mainline microprocessor business is doing well, especially the highest performance segments for servers, datacenters and cloud computing. Broken down by segment the numbers come out like this:
- PC Client Group revenue of $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially
Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET
How to synthesize a pretty good article Is SOI Really Less Expensive, and even more important the impressive amount of comments (56) generated? Let’s start with the initial article. Pretty good, but slightly biased, when you carefully dissect it, like I did in one of the comments (you can find it in-extenso at the end of this post).… Read More
The iPhone6 will have TSMC 20nm, Absolutely!
TSMC 20nm is one of the most talked about nodes on SemiWiki with lots of speculation and debate surrounding it. It’s interesting to look back at what we thought would happen to see if it actually did happen so let’s do that now. According to Google there are 411 articles referencing 20nm on SemiWiki, let’s visit a couple of the… Read More


A Century of Miracles: From the FET’s Inception to the Horizons Ahead