Clearly I’m a fan of IoT in regards to the future of the fabless semiconductor industry. The fabless semiconductor transformation unleashed all sorts of innovation giving us the SoC and the life changing mobile devices SoCs enable. Unfortunately modern SoC design is expensive and raising capital for semiconductor start-ups… Read More
IMEC Technology Symposium
Yesterday I attended the IMEC Technology Forum at Semicon West. As always with IMEC, they present so much information it is like drinking from a firehose. I’ll say more about the future of process technology in a blog later this week, but this blog is about IMEC itself. It is an amazing success story. Let’s face it, if you were going … Read More
Mentor Graphics @ SEMICON West 2014
Mentor is again the most represented EDA company at SEMICON West this year. I strongly advise Cadence and Synopsys to get more involved because EDA may be where electronics begins but semiconductor manufacturing makes all of our hard work come true, absolutely. Paul McLellan, Beth Martin, and I will be blogging live, I hope to see… Read More
GlobalFoundries Goes to Semicon West
Next week it is Semicon West, the big equipment vendor tradeshow. I love to go since EDA and semiconductor and all the stuff we are interested in here at Semiwiki are driven by equipment capabilities, especially lithography. The highest viewed blogs I write tend to be ones on technologies that are just a bit out beyond the stuff people… Read More
Intel is Speaking @ SEMICON West 2014!
The SEMICON West website has a nice “speakers” option where you can search by company and see who is talking about what. I’m always interested in what Intel has to say (they are still the leading semiconductor company) so here is the line-up for next week:
Intel Sanchali Bhattacharjee Subcomponent Supply Chain for 10nm and Beyond… Read More
This is How We Get One Million Design Starts!
One of the most interesting demos at #51DAC was the eSilicon GDS II online quote system for TSMC. Probably because eSilicon was one of the most interesting companies exhibiting this year. While writing the book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” we took a close look at the history of fabless semiconductor… Read More
Electronics growth positive around the world
Electronics production growth has turned positive in 2014 for all key geographic regions. The graph below shows three-month-average change versus a year ago for electronics production in local currency through April 2014. Total industrial production is used for Europe (EU countries) and South Korea since electronic production… Read More
Internet of Things (IoT) Startup Showcase @ SEMICON West!
It’s hard to believe that SEMICON West is upon us once again at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. This is the premier semiconductor conference for cutting-edge equipment, processes, and materials, to solutions to today’s design and manufacturing challenges. Remember, it’s not what you know (because … Read More
Is SOI Really Less Expensive?
Introduction
There have been some claims made recently that planar Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) is less expensive than bulk planar processes and FinFETs at various nodes. Some of these claims suggest that FinFETs in particular are significantly more expensive. My company, IC Knowledge LLC produces the most widely… Read More
National Semiconductor Education in the Cloud
“I wandered lonely as a cloud,” wrote Wordsworth. Well, clouds are pretty lonely in EDA these days. Despite some of the advantages on paper that mean that companies from salesforce.com to Netflix make heavy use of cloud-computing, semiconductor design has barely touched the cloud. One exception was Nimbic (acquired… Read More
CHIPS Act dies because employees are fired – NIST CHIPS people are probationary