I have a new-found respect for Lu Dai. He is a senior director of engineering at Qualcomm, with valuable insight into the ground realities of verification in a big semiconductor company. He is on the board of directors at RISC-V International and is chairman of the board of directors at Accellera, both giving him a top-down view of… Read More
Sino Semicap Sanction Screws Snugged- SVB- Aftermath more important than event
-Reports of further tightening of China SemiCap Restrictions
-Likely closing loopholes & pushing back technology line
-Dutch have joined, Japan will too- So far no Chinese reaction
-SVB is toast but repercussions may be far worse
Reports of tightening semiconductor sanctions on Friday
It was reported byBloomberg of Friday… Read More
SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference 2023 – AMAT Sculpta® Announcement
The SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference is the semiconductor industries premier conference on lithography. The 2023 conference was held the week of February 27th and at the conference Applied Materials announced their Sculpta® pattern shaping tool. Last week I had an opportunity to interview Steven Sherman the Managing … Read More
Cadence Hosts ESD Alliance Seminar on New Export Regulations Affecting EDA and SIP March 28
Anyone interested in learning about general trade compliance concepts or how export control and sanction regulations affect the electronic systems design ecosystem will want to attend the upcoming ESD Alliance export seminar. It will be hosted by Ada Loo, chair of the ESD Alliance Export Committee and Cadence’s Group Director… Read More
Report from SPIE- EUV’s next 15 years- AMAT “Sculpta” braggadocio rollout
-We attended the SPIE lithography Conference in San Jose
-No significant news or announcements on EUV
-Focus on 500WPM target and High & Hyper NA rollout
-AMAT overblown Sculpta-Not exactly what its cracked up to be
SPIE Lithography 2023
We have been attending SPIE for many years now and are happy to see a return to pre Covid levels… Read More
The Billion Dollar Question – Single or Double Digit Semiconductor Decline
In 2021, we shocked the industry with our predictions of a double-digit ‘supercycle’ in 2022, followed by a crash in 2023. Despite industry skepticism, bordering on outright disbelief, our predictions were on point, based on decades of semiconductor experience and data analysis.
Now, as the industry finally accepts the impending… Read More
Maven Silicon’s RISC-V Processor IP Verification Flow
RISC-V is a general-purpose license-free open Instruction Set Architecture [ISA] with multiple extensions. It is an ISA separated into a small base integer ISA, usable as a base for customized accelerators and optional standard extensions to support general-purpose software development. RISC-V supports both 32-bit and … Read More
Bleak Year for Semiconductors
The global semiconductor market in 2022 was $573.5 billion, according to WSTS. 2022 was up 3.2% from 2021, a significant slowdown from 26.2% growth in 2021. We at Semiconductor Intelligence track semiconductor market forecasts and award a virtual prize for the most accurate forecast for the year. The criteria are a forecast publicly… Read More
AMAT- Flat is better than down-Trailing tool strength offsets memory- backlog up
-Strength in trailing tools offsets weak memory resulting in flat
-Order book very volatile but backlog surprisingly still grew
-Trailing edge VS Leading edge = 50/50 – Foundry/logic over 2/3
-Not nearly as bad as Lam but not as good as ASML
AMAT posts good quarter & guide – Flat for three quarters
Applied Materials… Read More
IEDM 2023 – 2D Materials – Intel and TSMC
Intel and TSMC make up two of the three leading edge logic companies. At IEDM held in December 2022, Intel presented a paper on 2D Materials and TSMC presented 6 papers. Clearly 2D materials are of great interest at least to two of the three leading edge logic companies. Before diving into the papers, some background context is needed.… Read More


Musk’s Orbital Compute Vision: TERAFAB and the End of the Terrestrial Data Center