Back in April, 2019, TSMC announced that they were introducing their 5 nm technology in risk production and now at IEDM 2019 they brought forth a detailed description of the process which has passed 1000 hour HTOL and will be in high volume production in 1H 2020. This 5nm technology is a full node scaling from 7nm using smart scaling… Read More
Intel vs AMD Q4 2019 Conference Calls
Now that the dust has settled and I’m out of cronovirus quarantine let’s talk about the Intel and AMD conference calls. Unfortunately, the Intel and AMD marketing teams are still outpacing engineering so it is difficult to write something serious but I will do my best.
Spoiler Alert: Both CEOs disappoint.
First an Intel 10nm update:… Read More
WEBINAR: Prototyping With Intel’s New 80M Gate FPGA
The next generation FPGAs have been announced, and they are BIG! Intel is shipping its Stratix 10 GX 10M FPGA, and Xilinx has announced its VU19P FPGA for general availability in the Fall of next year. The former is expected to support about 80M ASIC gates, and the latter about 50M ASIC gates. And, to bring this mind-boggling gate… Read More
Specialized Accelerators Needed for Cloud Based ML Training
The use of machine learning (ML) to solve complex problems that could not previously be addressed by traditional computing is expanding at an accelerating rate. Even with advances in neural network design, ML’s efficiency and accuracy are highly dependent on the training process. The methods used for training evolved from CPU… Read More
ASML “A Swing to Memory Looms” Nice performance while awaiting Memory bounce
- Good Q4 & 2019 despite weak memory
- 2020 will be up year but memory an unknown
- EUV ramp is on track – no China or memory impact
ASML reported sales of 4B Euros and a nice gross margin of 48% resulting in 2.70 Euros per share in earnings. Orders came in at 2.4B
TSMC Q4 2019 “2020 Bellwether” Conference Call Summary
After returning from a week in Southern China I found the TSMC Q4 2019 conference call even more interesting. In China they are preparing for the New Year’s Celebration so everything is very festive but what struck me hardest was the massive investment in infrastructure and security. Semiconductors are of course a big part… Read More
The Tech Week that was January 13-17 2020
In a week where the “phase 1” trade deal between US and China was finally signed, here is all the key news from the semiconductor and technology sector around the world.
After 2 years of an ever increasing trade war, the US and China have signed the so called Phase 1 deal aimed at reducing trade frictions.
Just as important as what is … Read More
Samsung spend is up but can it offest TSMC slowing?
Samsung is warming up and spending again
Samsung gave its preliminary report for Q4 and it was well better than prior muted expectations. It doesn’t take long for Samsung’s business units to respond to business trends in either direction and we have already heard of increased spending plans on the part of Samsung.… Read More
The Tech Week that was January 6-10 2020
Happy New Year to everyone.. lets hope 2020 is a great year.. The indicators are all pointing in the right direction but it will not take much to derail it if external factors change. Here is my weekly summary of all the important news from the semiconductor industry around the world.
2020 is starting very differently from 2019 with… Read More
IEDM 2019 – IBM and Leti
IBM and Leti each presented several papers at IEDM including a joint nanosheet paper. I had the opportunity to sit down with Huiming Bu, director of advanced logic & memory tech and Veeraraghavan Basker, senior engineer from IBM and then in a separate interview Francois Andrieu, head of advanced CMOS laboratory and Shay Reboh,… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot