The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel. We had a really complex process! But —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx. TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology. We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More
TSMC OIP Overview and Agenda!
The TSMC Symposium and OIP Ecosystem Fourm are the most coveted events of the year for the fabless semiconductor ecosystem, absolutely. In my 35 years of semiconductor experience never has there been a more exciting time in the ecosystem and that is clear by the overview and agenda for this year’s event. I hope to see you there:… Read More
Semicon West 2019 – Day 4 – Soitec
Last year at Semicon I sat down with Soitec and got an update on the company. You can read my write up from last year here. A key point last year was Soitec was continuing to be profitable and grow after several years of financial struggles.
On Thursday, July 11th I got to sit down with Soitec’s CEO, Paul Boudre and get an update on… Read More
Semicon West 2019 – Day 3 – Global Foundries
On Wednesday, July 10th I got to sit down with Gary Patton, CTO and SVP of worldwide research and development of Global Foundries and get an update on how the company is doing.
We started with a discussion of Global Foundries (GF) general business health. Revenue for the year is expected to be around $6 billion dollars. They are focused… Read More
Chapter 3 – Moore’s Law is Unconstitutional!
(Adapted from a presentation first given under this title in 1989 and subsequently expanded in presentations over a period of nearly thirty years)
In 1965, Gordon Moore, then R&D Manager for Fairchild Semiconductor, published a paper in “Electronics” magazine predicting the trend for semiconductors in the next ten years. … Read More
The Coming Tsunami in Multi-chip Packaging
The pace of Moore’s Law scaling for monolithic integrated circuit density has abated, due to a combination of fundamental technical challenges and financial considerations. Yet, from an architectural perspective, the diversity in end product requirements continues to grow. New heterogeneous processing units are being… Read More
1971 is the year that Intel changed the world
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
From time to time I present the History of Silicon Valley as I saw it to various audiences. I always enjoy doing that. I’ve learned that the part that audiences like the most is the Apple / Steve Jobs story. That’s not hard to understand. Steve Jobs was truly fascinating! The story… Read More
Intel let there be RAM
The “20 Questions with John East” series continues
Intel was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who had left Fairchild earlier that year. They immediately hired Andy Grove. Noyce, Moore and Grove were a study in contrasts. I had various dealings over the years with Noyce and Grove, but have met Moore only twice. They… Read More
TSMC in the Cloud Update #56thDAC 2019
During my Taiwan visit, prior to Las Vegas, I was fortunate to spend time with Willy Chen and Vivian Jiang to prepare for the cloud panel I moderated at #56thDAC. Willy and Vivian are part of the ever-important Design Infrastructure Marketing Division of TSMC, which includes the internal and external cloud efforts. TSMC first announced… Read More
#56DAC – What’s New with Custom Design Platform
TSMC attends DAC every year and they do something very savvy, it’s a theatre where they invite all of their EDA and IP partners to present something of interest, followed by a drawing for a prize. At the end of the day they even have a nice prize, like a MacBook Air, which I didn’t win. On Wednesday I watched Dave Reed of Synopsys… Read More
Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding is Here