At TSMC’s OIP Symposium recently, Xilinx announced that they would not be building products at the 10nm node. I say “announced” since I was hearing it for the first time, but maybe I just missed it before. Xilinx would go straight from the 16FF+ arrays that they have announced but not started shipping, and to the… Read More
How to Build an IoT Endpoint in Three Months
It is often said that things go in big cycles. One example of this is the design and manufacturing products. People long ago used to build their own things. Think of villagers or settlers hundreds of years ago, if they needed something they would craft it themselves. Then came the industrial revolution and two things happened. One… Read More
Samsung to cut Semi Capex 20% due to over capacity
Article confirms market fears…
An article in the Korea Times cites sources that say Samsung will cut Semi Capex by 20% due to current oversupply and weak pricing. This is obviously a huge negative as Capex for 2016 will certainly be down significantly from 2015 given these cuts which follow on cuts by Intel and others. We can… Read More
SEMI SMC: Atoms Still Don’t Scale
Last Tuesday was the SEMI’s annual Strategic Materials Conference (SMC). The opening keynotes were given by Gary Patton, the CTO of GlobalFoundries, and Mark Thirsk, Managing Partner of Linx Consulting. This year it was held in the Computer History Museum (which always makes the commute interesting since you have to fight… Read More
How GlobalFoundries’ CTO Nearly Became a Lawyer…Called Funkhauser
I sat down for a chat with Gary Patton, the CTO of GlobalFoundries, at today’s SEMI Strategic Materials Conference where he had just given one of the keynotes (which I’ll cover another time). His family name isn’t really Patton, his grandfather’s name was Funkhauser, but his step-grandfather’s… Read More
New Sensing Scheme for OTP Memories
Last week at TSMC’s OIP symposium, Jen-Tai Hsu, Kilopass’s VP R&D, presented A New Solution to Sensing Scheme Issues Revealed.
See also Jen-Tai Hsu Joins Kilopass and Looks to the Future of Memories
He started with giving some statistics about Kilopass:
- 50+ employees
- 10X growth 2008 to 1015
- over 80 patents (including
Dialog and Atmel, 2 cultures to build 1 successful company ?
Consolidation is on-going in semi industry, as we learn that Dialog Semi just announced the acquisition of Atmel. Is it a good news for Atmel, or for Dialog ? Apparently not for the stock market, as Dialog stock went down by 20% within the last few hours… But we can try to look more in-depth at the potential synergy between these two companies’s… Read More
The Paradox of Atmel No More
Technology pundits said Atmel is one of the best-positioned companies in the Internet of Things (IoT) realm, if not the best IoT company outright. The San Jose, California–based chipmaker boasts an enormous portfolio of microcontrollers and a deep expertise in security and automotive electronics hardware. Yet its underperforming… Read More
Four Takeaways from the TSMC OIP 2015
Paul M. did an excellent job summarizing the technical information that TSMC presented at the recent Open Innovation Platform symposium. I’d like to also share an impression on four areas that struck me as key to TSMC’s strategy.… Read More
TSMC OIP: What to Do With 20,000 Wafers Per Day
Today it is TSMC’s OIP Ecosystem Innovation forum. This is an annual event but is also a semi-annual update on TSMC’s processes, investment, volume ramps and more. TSMC have changed the rules for the conference this year: they have published all the presentations by their partners/customers. Tom Quan of TSMC told… Read More
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