While Alchip is speeding its way down the TSMC process technology roadmap I am reminded how important services are to the semiconductor ecosystem. We can thank ASIC companies like Alchip for the heavy investment systems companies have made into semiconductors. We covered this in our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor… Read More
SEMICON West – Applied Materials Selective Gap Fill Announcement
At SEMICON West, Applied Materials announced a new selective gap fill tool to address the growing resistance issues in interconnect at small dimensions. I had the opportunity to discuss this new tool and the applications for it with Zhebo Chen global product manager in the Metal Deposition Products group at Applied Materials.… Read More
AMAT- Solid QTR & Great Guide- Share gains- Memory?
Higher Foundry/logic exposure helps-
Little or no Covid or China trade impact-
Nice quarter but even better guide-
Applied reported revenues of $4.4B and NonGAAP EPS of $1.06, nicely above street estimates of $4.2B and $0.95 in EPS. Guidance is for revenues $4.6B +-$200M and EPS of $1.17+- $0.06, versus current expectations of… Read More
NetApp: Comprehensive Support for Moving Your EDA Flow to the Cloud
With this post, we welcome NetApp to the SemiWiki family. NetApp was founded in 1992 with a focus on data storage solutions. Initial market segments were high-performance computing (HPC) and EDA and their first customers were EDA and semiconductor companies. NetApp has become a primary force in on-premise data management for… Read More
KLAC Solid QTR and Guide With No China Worries
KLA reports excellent June & Better Sept Guide-
Orbotech Diversification Helps provide growth-
Mix is perfect-China working fine-
Foundry is solid-
Solid execution and Financials
KLAC reported $1.46B in revenues and $2.73 Non GAAP with gross margins of 60.3%. That is versus expectations of $1.42B and EPS of $2.41…a… Read More
How Samtec Puts the Customer First
An exceptional customer experience starts before the sale. Successful companies realize it never ends. Dedicated post-sales support and a robust ecosystem for aftermarket product extensions are ingredients that tend to delight the customer. These comments are relevant in the consumer sector, but they apply to high tech as… Read More
LRCX Strong Beat and Guide
Lam reported strong beat & guide, memory returns-
China trade and Covid impact near zero-
Looking at a strong H2 with WFE in mid $50B+-
Back on Cruise Control
Lam reported a great quarter, easily beating expectations coming in at $2.79B and $4.78 in non GAAP EPS-
Guide is for $3.1B +-$200M and EPS of $5.06+-$0.40-
Margins and all… Read More
Imec Technology Forum and ASML
On Thursday July 9 Imec held a virtual technology forum. Imec is one of the premier research organizations working on semiconductor technology and their forums are always interesting. My area of interest is process technology and the following are my observation in that area from the forum.
Luc Van Den Hove
Luc Van Den Hove is the… Read More
VLSI Symposium 2020 – Imec Buried Power Rail
The 2020 VLSI Technology Symposium was held as a virtual conference from June 14th through June 19th. At the symposium Imec gave an interesting paper on Buried Power Rails (BPR) and I had a chance to interview one of the authors, Anshul Gupta.
As logic devices continue to scale down metal pitch is reaching a limit. Imec defines a pitch… Read More
Semiconductors up in 2020? Not so fast
Two months ago most forecasts called for a decline in the semiconductor market in 2020 as reported in our Semiconductor Intelligence May 2020 newsletter. The outlook changed in June, as the Worldwide Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) consensus forecast projected 3.3% growth in 2020. This month IC Insights revised its IC


TSMC Formally Sues Ex-SVP Over Alleged Transfer of Trade Secrets to Intel