As the semiconductor consolidation continues and thousands of semiconductor professionals update their LinkedIn profiles, the march to create new silicon opportunities is increasing at a rapid pace. It is 1980s deja vu all over again when the fabless business model reenergized the semiconductor industry and brought affordable… Read More
IMEC and Cadence Disclose 5nm Test Chip
Recently imec and Cadence disclosed that they had fabricated 5nm test chips. This afternoon Dan Nenni and I had a conference call with Praveen Raghavan, principal engineer at imec, and Vassilios Gerousis, distinguished engineer at Cadence to get more details on what the test chip is and what was learned.
First off Vassilios really… Read More
Dinner with the Man who is Reshaping the Semiconductor Industry!
The recent mega acquisition of Broadcom Corp by Avago can be traced all the way back to Silicon Valley stalwart Hewlett Packard (founded in a two car Palo Alto garage in 1939). Even more interesting is the man behind the acquisition and how he got to where he is today.Avago began as the semiconductor products division of HP in 1961, … Read More
Nine Cost Considerations to Keep IP Relevant –Part2
In the first part of this article I wrote about four types of costs which must be considered when an IP goes through design differentiation, customization, characterization, and selection and evaluation for acquisition. In this part of the article, I will discuss about the other five types of costs which must be considered to enhance… Read More
Semiconductor Inventories Under Control
The semiconductor market is currently in a slow growth period. After 10% growth in 2014, the market is expected to only show low single-digit growth in 2015. Our own forecast at Semiconductor Intelligence is 1.5%. In several previous market slowdowns, inventories in the channel have climbed as some companies were slow to adjust… Read More
Nine Cost Considerations to Keep IP Relevant
It’s about 15 years the concept of IP development and its usage took place. In the recent past the semiconductor industry witnessed start of a large number of IP companies across the globe. However, according to Gary Smith’s presentation before the start of 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC, IP business is expected to remain stagnant for next… 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
The Future of Moore’s Law
I’ve lived in Silicon Valley then moved north to the Silicon Forest (aka Portland, Oregon) in 1995, and thankfully we have a lot of high-tech companies here like: Intel, Lam Research (Novellus), Lattice Semi, Qorvo, Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence, Northwest Logic, etc. There’s a global industry organization called… Read More
eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon
eSilicon have a new website. Companies update their websites regularly, so why is this news? Well, eSilicon increasingly does their business on the web. They are not like Facebook, say, where their business is entirely web-based, there is a physical business behind them. So they are more like Lyft for chips. Obviously Lyft requires… Read More
China: drag on global semiconductor market?
The Chinese stock market (as measured by the Hang Seng Index) dropped 11% from August 14 to August 24 over concerns of a slowing economy. In reaction, the U.S. stock market (as measured by the S&P 500) dropped 11% from August 17 to August 25. The China market has since rebounded 2% while the U.S. market rebounded 5%. Will a slowing… Read More
AI RTL Generation versus AI RTL Verification