At SEMICON West two weeks ago, Bob Johnson of Gartner presented the outlook for the semiconductor market, semiconductor capital spending, and wafer fab equipment spending. Thanks to Daniel Nenni for providing the link to the SEMI/Gartner Market Symposium presentations at https://sites.google.com/a/semi.org/market-symposium/home/speaker-presentations… Read More
Setting the Record Straight on FD-SOI Costs
I recently published an article on Semiwiki “Is SOI Really Less Expensive”. That article was the result of months of careful research and analysis. I looked at planar FDSOI versus bulk planar, bulk FinFETs and FinFETs on SOI at three different nodes. I took a consistent set of assumptions with respect to the fab used to run the processes,… Read More
SEMICON Update: 450mm, EUV, FinFET, and More
I spent all of last week at SEMICON West meeting with customers, potential customers, partners and various industry analysts and experts. I was involved in many interesting discussions over the course of the week and I thought I would share some of the more interesting observations:
Alternate Fin Materials Pushed Out
I have for… Read More
eSilicon and IDT Collaborate on Next-generation RapidIO Switches
Earlier in the week, eSilicon and IDT announced a collaboration to accelerate development of next-generation RapidIO switches. These are used to meet the higher performance demands required for new wireless, embedded and computing infrastructures. The two companies will initially work together to develop RapidIO switches… Read More
Connect with India at SEMICON West
“Connect with India” was a very successful event this year at Semicon West. Bettina Weiss (Vice President of Business Development at SEMI) organized this event. Along with several dignitaries from Indian government and its upcoming semiconductor industry, there were several semiconductor industry professionals… Read More
EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More
Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
To wrap up Semicon West, let’s go back to Monday and the imec presentations. In fact, An Steegen’s presentation titled The Semiconductor Roadmap. She covered a lot of ground, but some of her slides contain a wealth of information. Let’s look at the options for 10nm, 7nm and a little 5nm, what imec call N10, N7 and… Read More
Bob Metcalfe Keynote at #semiconwest
My PhD is in distributed file systems so one of the key networking papers was Metcalfe and Boggs, 1976. It was titled Ethernet: Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks. This was the paper that introduced the world to Ethernet and to Bob Metcalfe. He was on stage yesterday here at Semicon West to give the afternoon… Read More
Mark Adams Keynote at #semiconwest
The first surprise of the opening keynote for Semicon West was on the slides that were cycling on the screen as the room filled up. Somehow our book Fabless had managed to be in the rotation.
The opening keynote was by Mark Adams, the President of Micron. He was talking about upcoming big changes in the semiconductor environment, although… Read More
The Internet of Things @ SEMICON West 2014!
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
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