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
Strategic Materials
Here on SemiWiki we spend a certain amount of time discussing semiconductor equipment, especially the big sea-change items like EUV and 450mm, where everyone wants to know when (and if) they will happen. But there is another aspect to next generation processes other than equipment and that is materials. When the received wisdom… Read More
Just One Month to SEMICON Taiwan
SEMICON Taiwan is the first week of September in the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center. To be precise it is September 2nd to 4th. Last year there over 26,000 people attended. This year it is the 20th anniversary show. SEMICON Taiwan attracts the world’s leading technology companies who design, develop, manufacture, and supply … Read More
Good Morning Vietnam
This morning I went to a presentation in Palo Alto about outsourcing in Vietnam. You have probably heard that Vietnam is the new China for manufacturing, as wages have increased in the Shenzhen area then companies like Foxconn have opened plants in Vietnam. But this meeting was mostly about services, software and design. In this… Read More
Ultra-low Power IP for Wearables
Wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT) in general are all about low power. Everyone must have read (or even experienced) the phenomenon of putting something like a Fitbit on and then after a short period leaving it in a drawer or putting it to recharge and forgetting about it for weeks. The longer devices can last the more likely… Read More
SEMICON West 2015 Recap – Day 1 – Softening Markets, Sub 14nm and 3D NAND
Tuesday morning press briefing
The show started for me Tuesday morning with the SEMI press briefing. SEMI said there are 1,200 booths this year, 629 exhibiting companies and over 180 hours of programming. They also said pre-registration was up from last year and they expect 26,000 visitors.
Dan Tracy then gave an update on the markets.… Read More
Cost Modeling as a Decision Making Tool
The use of simulation is well established in the semiconductor industry. Virtually all circuit designs are run through a Spice simulation, layouts are analyzed for timing issues and even process development employs process simulation tools. What I believe is less widely used but just as useful is cost modeling.
The semiconductor… Read More
AI Bubble?