The recent teardowns of Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone have one thing written all over them: Samsung is doubling down on its logic business. Although most of the technology press coverage went to Exynos 7420, the first mobile SoC manufactured at the 14nm FinFET process, Samsung’s other logic chips inside the S6 handset equally… Read More
TSMC 10nm Readiness and 3DIC
At the TSMC Technology Symposium last month Suk Lee presented a lot of information on design enablement. Suk is an interesting guy with a unique background in ASIC, Semiconductor, EDA, and now Foundry. In baseball terms that would be like playing infield, outfield, home plate, and umpire!
Around the turn of the millennium Suk actually… Read More
Why Intel will Never Succeed in IoT Market?
Let me precise that by “IoT” I think about the IoT devices market, made of hundreds of application, wearable gadget to medical, home automation, and so on. One direct consequence of IoT (device) market explosion will be the strong growth of the server market (cloud), to transfer, compute and store information generated by the billions… Read More
Extending Moore in Silicon
A year ago many eulogized the death of Moore’s Law at 28nm due to higher prices per transistor at more advanced nodes, but now that we have celebrated the 50th anniversary let’s look ahead to technology scaling and electronic systems miniaturization for the next decade. Despite our industry’s bipolar tendencies and daunting technical… Read More
Single Chip MCU + DSP Architecture for Automotive: SAMV71
It’s all about Cost of Ownership (CoO) and system level integration. If you target automotive related application, like audio or video processing or control of systems (Motor control, Inverter…) you need to integrate strong performance capable MCU with a DSP. In fact if you expect your system to support Audio Video Bridging (AVB)… Read More
Motley Fooled by FinFETs!
There was an article on Motley Fool recently detailing Intel’s 14nm FinFETs and comparing them to TSMC. Unfortunately the author has zero semiconductor education or experience even though he writes with authority on all things semiconductor. He also has no shame in using outdated papers from conferences he did not even… Read More
GlobalFoundries: 14 in 15 in 8
How is that for a cryptic title? It is GlobalFoundries’ rallying cry. Their big focus is to bring up 14nm during 2015 in fab 8 in Malta NY.
Last week I chatted to Shubhankar Basu. He is the senior product line manager for leading edge technologies. Not surprisingly, that means he is currently leading the 14nm FinFET business. He told… Read More
2015 Semiconductor Capex led by Memory & Foundry
Semiconductor industry capital expenditures (capex) in 2015 are expected to be $69 billion in 2015, up 6% from $65 billion in 2014 according to IC Insights. We at Semiconductor Intelligence have compiled 2015 capex outlook by company. The major memory companies account for 38% of 2015 capex and the major foundries account for … Read More
Shift-West of Semicon Power Centers
It’s true that Japan was once the center of semiconductor business and we were carrying on with that perception until recently. In 1990, six out of top10 semiconductor companies (excluding pure-play foundries) were in Japan; and 59% of worldwide semiconductor market was concentrated with the top10 companies. The semiconductor… Read More
Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law – part 5
In the first four installments of this series we have examined Moore’s law, described the drivers that have enabled Moore’s law and discussed the specific status and issues around DRAM and logic. In this final installment we will examine NAND Flash.… Read More
Is Intel About to Take Flight?