Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He served as VP and BU manager of the Analog Mixed Signal Group at Microsemi. He was the VP of Operations and Technology Development at Open-Silicon. He was the VP of Technology at Lightspeed Semiconductor where he joined the founding team that invented… Read More
Maximizing ASIC Performance through Post-GDSII Backend Services
ASICs by definition are designed to meet the respective applications’ requirements. ASIC engineers deploy various design techniques to maximize performance, minimize power and reduce chip size. But is there more that can be done after the GDSII is taped out? A recent press release from Alchip Technology dated Feb 4, 2021 claims… Read More
NetApp Enables Secure B2B Data Sharing for the Semiconductor Industry
Data sharing between semiconductor companies and EDA software companies has been critical to the advancement of the industry. But it’s had security issues and associated loss of trust along the way. For instance, there have been cases of customer designs shared as a testcase finding their way into a product demo without the … Read More
Semiconductor Shortage – No Quick Fix – Years of neglect & financial hills to climb
– Semi Situation Stems from long term systemic neglect
– Will require much more than money & time than thought
– Fundamental change is needed to offset the financial bias
– Auto industry is just the hint of a much larger problem
Like recognizing global warming when the water is up to your neck
The problem… Read More
CEO interview: Graham Curren of Sondrel
It has been my pleasure to interview Graham Curren, CEO of Sondrel. A veteran of the Electronics Design industry, he founded Sondrel in 2002 to provide digital ASIC designs.
How did you aim to differentiate Sondrel when you started?
My view of the market was that there were a lot of small design companies and also huge in-house design… Read More
Silicon Catalyst and mmTron are Helping to Make mmWave 5G a Reality
Everyone is talking about 5G these days. The buildout is beginning. The newest iPhone supports the new 3GPP standard. Excitement is building. But there is a back story to all this. Silicon Catalyst recently added a new company called mmTron to their incubator program. These folks are millimeter wave experts and that turns out to… Read More
How do you plan the best Bitcoin miner in the world?
As many of you know Bitcoin prices have surged recently up to $40,000 USD per bitcoin as of February 2021. We are in the middle of a bit rush! People are noticing Bitcoin’s surge and wondering how they can profit from it. In this article we will explore how custom silicon is a vital part of a winning bitcoin mining strategy.
Some… Read More
Intel Node Names
There is a lot of interest right now in how Intel compares to the leading foundries and what the future may hold.
Several years ago, I published several extremely popular articles converting processes from various companies to “Equivalent Nodes” (EN). Nodes were at one time based on actual physical features of processes but had… Read More
How SerDes Became Key IP for Semiconductor Systems
We have seen that the interface IP category is seeing incredibly high growth rate over the last two decades and we expect this category to generate an ongoing high source of IP revenues for at least another decade. But if we dig into the various successful protocols like PCI Express, Ethernet or USB, we can detect a common function … Read More
Semiconductors up 6.5% in 2020, >10% in 2021?
Semiconductor sales in 2020 were $439.0 billion, up 6.5% from $412.3 billion in 2019, according to World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS).
We at Semiconductor Intelligence have been tracking the accuracy of semiconductor market forecasts from various sources for several years. We look at publicly available projections… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet