Samsung, #1 in the mobile phones based on unit shipments, has two big problems in mobile. Apple’s iPhone; and China in general and Huawei in particular in the Android world where they live. They have just announced their fifth quarter of decline. Revenue was down 8% year on year but operating profit declined 38%. They sold … Read More
FD-SOI: a Gentle Introduction
Over the last couple of weeks, FD-SOI has been in the news with GlobalFoundries announcement of a 22nm FD-SOI process that will run in the Dresden Fab. Also, earlier in the week I talked to Thomas Skotnicki about the saga (and it is a saga) of how FD-SOI got from his PhD thesis to volume manufacturing and global deployment. But there … Read More
Who Needs to Lead at the 14, 10 and 7nm nodes
IBM recently disclosed a working 7nm test chip generating a lot of excitement in the semiconductor industry and also in the mainstream media. In this article I wanted to explore the 14nm, 10nm and 7nm nodes, the status of the key competitors at each node and what it may mean for the companies.
3 Key Frontiers for Samsung’s Next Mobile SoC
Samsung’s Exynos 7420 system-on-chip (SoC) is now at the top of the world when it comes to performance and power efficiency benchmarks. It’s also won accolades as the first mobile chipset manufactured using the 14nm FinFET fabrication process.
However, the mobile chipsets landscape is hypercompetitive, and there… Read More
Samsung: the Journey to 14nm and 10nm
At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More
eSilicon@Samsung: ASIC Design, IP Enablement, and Cloud Platform
Earlier this week at DAC, Javier DeLaCruz of eSilicon presented at the Samsung booth. They presented an introduction to what eSilicon does. However, since what they do has changed over the years it is useful to recap. If you know about eSilicon then you probably think of them as a fabless ASIC company. The old ASIC model back in the … Read More
"Cook’s Law" supersedes "Moore’s Law"-its impact on Apple, Samsung, TSMC & Intel
Apple drives the semi industry harder than Wintel ever did: Is winning Apple’s chip business a pyrrhic victory? Is 14nm done before it starts? Too short to be profitable?
Chips marching to an Apple cadence…
In the “old days” when Wintel ruled the roost and drove the semi industry, it was driving spending… Read More
Why does Apple do business with Samsung?
The Apple and Samsung relationship is an interesting one. On one hand they have co-developed some of the most innovative products on the market today (iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch) yet they are fierce competitors in the mobile market. Some call this type of business relationship “frenemies” others refer to the old Italian proverb… Read More
Samsung Foundry Debuts 10nm Wafer!
The Samsung Smart, Connected Lifestyle event was last night at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco. Getting into San Francisco was no picnic with all of the roadwork and new building construction. We even saw people drive up on the sidewalk to get around car clogs. It really was crazy but definitely worth it after seeing the first … Read More
Samsung Foundry Update!
It is hard to believe that Samsung is celebrating their 10[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary in the foundry business this year. It certainly has not been an easy road but as of late you cannot argue with the results. Samsung is the first foundry to put 14nm silicon into smart phones, beating the #1 semiconductor company (Intel) and the #1 … Read More
ASML and TSMC’s 12-Inch Photomask Initiative: Technical Significance