Last week Samsung hosted the GSA Silicon Valley “State of the Industry” Meet-up which was well attended by the semiconductor elite, myself included. The agenda started with an update on the semiconductor industry outlook followed by deep dives into Automotive, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity all of which are… Read More
Could China Take the Lead in Installed 300mm Capacity?
China buys more than half of the semiconductors manufactured in the world and yet only produces less the 10% of their own demand. Recently there have been a lot of announcements out of China about large scale investments in semiconductor manufacturing. The Chinese government for example has announced plans to invest $161 billion… Read More
Xilinx vs Altera Update 2017
I truly miss the Xilinx versus Altera war of words (competition at its finest) and competition is what makes the fabless semiconductor ecosystem truly great, absolutely. So with great disappointment I read the Intel Analyst Day transcript published by Bloomberg last week. It is attached at the bottom in case you are interested… Read More
GlobalFoundries Makes Pure-Play Foundry Great Again!
The pure-play foundry business just got stronger and so did semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. As we all know, the fabless semiconductor industry started by utilizing extra capacity from traditional semiconductor manufacturers (IDMs). However, putting your designs in the hands of a competitor is not a good … Read More
Intel Alternative Facts!
Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, announced a $7B investment in Fab 42 in Arizona in the oval office, next to Trump as evidence of a positive reaction to Trump’s new policies.
Alternative fact; Paul Otellini, then Intel’s CEO, made a similar promise about Fab 42 in the company of Obama in 2011, during a visit to Hillsboro,… Read More
Scott Jones ISS Talk – Moore’s Law Lives!
I was invited to give a talk at this year’s ISS conference, the talk seemed to be very well received and I was asked to blog about it for SemiWiki. Parts of the talk will be familiar to SemiWiki readers from some of my previous blogs but I also went into more detail around some scaling challenges. The following is a summary of what… Read More
AMD vs Intel Update!
Is it just me or has AMD just pulled off one of the most amazing semiconductor comebacks of the century? Let’s take a closer look.
Who doesn’t long for the days when Intel and AMD went head to head in the battle for microprocessor supremacy? Back then Intel, was still operating under the Andrew Grove mantra of “Only the Paranoid Survive”… Read More
SPIE Advanced Lithography and Synopsys!
SPIE is the premier event for lithography held in Silicon Valley and again Scotten Jones and I will be attending. EUV is generally the star of the show and this year will be no different now that TSMC has committed to EUV production in 2019.
Last year at SPIE, TSMC presented the history of EUV development from the beginning in 1985 as … Read More
ISS Gary Patton Keynote: FD-SOI, FinFETS, and Beyond!
Two weeks ago the SEMI ISS Conference was held at Half Moon Bay in California. On the opening day of the conference Gary Patton CTO of GLOBALFOUNDRIES gave the keynote address and I also had the chance to sit down with Gary for an interview the next day.
AAPl Vs QCOM Who wins?
Things just got interesting in the iPhone supply chain with the $1B AAPL Vs QCOM legal action filed this week. For the life of me I could not understand why Apple second sourced the normally QCOM modem in the iPhone 7. It caused quite a stir in the technical community but we could only surmise that it was a price issue on the business side.… Read More
Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding is Here