One of the more exciting design start market segments that we track is Artificial Intelligence related ASICs. With NVIDIA making billions upon billions of dollars repurposing GPUs as AI engines in the cloud, the Application Specific Integrated Circuit business was sure to follow. Google now has its Tensor Processing Unit, Intel… Read More
TSMC EDA 2.0 With Machine Learning: Are We There Yet ?
Recently we have been swamped by news of Artificial Intelligence applications in hardware and software by the increased adoption of Machine Learning (ML) and the shift of electronic industry towards IoT and automobiles. While plenty of discussions have covered the progress of embedded intelligence in product roll-outs, an… Read More
Deep Learning and Cloud Computing Make 7nm Real
The challenges of 7nm are well documented. Lithography artifacts create exploding design rule complexity, mask costs and cycle time. Noise and crosstalk get harder to deal with, as does timing closure. The types of applications that demand 7nm performance will often introduce HBM memory stacks and 2.5D packaging, and that creates… Read More
Choosing the lesser of 2 evils EUV vs Multi Patterning!
For Halloween this week we thought it would be appropriate to talk about things that strike fear into the hearts of semiconductor makers and process engineers toiling away in fabs. Do I want to do multi-patterning with the huge increase in complexity, number of steps, masks and tools or do I want to do EUV with unproven tools, unproven… Read More
Arm TechCon Preview with the Foundries!
This week Dr. Eric Esteve, Dr. Bernard Murphy, and I will be blogging live from Arm TechCon. It really looks like it will be a great conference so you should see some interesting blogs in the coming days. One of the topics I am interested in this year is foundation IP and I will tell you why.
During the fabless transformation of the semiconductor… Read More
TSMC: Semiconductors in the next ten years!
The TSMC 30th Anniversary Forum just ended so I will share a few notes before the rest of the media chimes in. The forum was live streamed on tsmc.com, hopefully it will be available for replay. The ballroom at the Grand Hyatt in Taipei was filled with cameras, semiconductor executives, and security personnel.
The… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES RF Leadership
“Mobile is the largest platform ever built by humanity”, Christiano Amon, Executive Vice President, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and President, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies speaking at the GLOBALFOUNDRIES Technologies Conference (GTC) 2017.… Read More
IEDM 2017 Preview
The 63rd annual IEDM (International Electron Devices Meeting) will be held December 2nd through 6th in San Francisco. In my opinion IEDM is one of, if not the premier conference on leading edge semiconductor technology. I will be attending the conference again this year and providing coverage for SemiWiki. As a member of the press… Read More
Reliability Signoff for FinFET Designs
Ansys recently hosted a webinar on reliability signoff for FinFET-based designs, spanning thermal, EM, ESD, EMC and aging effects. I doubt you’re going to easily find a more comprehensive coverage of reliability impact and analysis solutions. If you care about reliability in FinFET designs, you might want to check out this webinar.… Read More
TSMC Teamwork Translates to Technical Triumph
Most people think that designing successful high speed analog circuits requires a mixture of magic, skill and lots of hard work. While this might be true, in reality it also requires a large dose of collaboration among each of the members of the design, tool and fabrication panoply. This point was recently made abundantly clear … Read More
Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding is Here