This week the Coronavirus has been escalated to a Global Health Emergency status by the WHO, China extended the Chinese New Year shutdown to 9th February and many companies have implemented a travel ban on business travel to/from China or Asia as well as implementing other business continuity procedures. The last crisis in 2003… Read More
Advanced CMOS Technology 2020 (The 10/7/5 NM Nodes)
Our friends at Threshold Systems have a new class that may be of interest to you. It’s an updated version of the Advanced CMOS Technology class held last May. As part of the previous class we did a five part series on The Evolution of the Extension Implant which you can see on the Threshold Systems SemiWiki landing page HERE. And… Read More
The Tech Week that was January 20-24 2020
Happy Chinese New Year. Let’s hope the Year of the Rat brings a recovery for the semiconductor industry. The initial signs are all good with many positive indications in the news this week, but let’s hope the Wuhan coronavirus doesn’t derail the recovery by becoming a global emergency. To all those based in China stay safe … Read More
ASML “A Swing to Memory Looms” Nice performance while awaiting Memory bounce
- Good Q4 & 2019 despite weak memory
- 2020 will be up year but memory an unknown
- EUV ramp is on track – no China or memory impact
ASML reported sales of 4B Euros and a nice gross margin of 48% resulting in 2.70 Euros per share in earnings. Orders came in at 2.4B
IEDM 2019 – Imec Interviews
Imec is one of the premier semiconductor research organizations and at IEDM they presented dozens of papers. I had the opportunity to see several of the papers presented and interview 3 of Imec’s researchers.
Jan Van Houdt, DMTS ferroelectric and exploratory memory
I have had very interesting discussions with Imec researchers… Read More
Samsung spend is up but can it offest TSMC slowing?
Samsung is warming up and spending again
Samsung gave its preliminary report for Q4 and it was well better than prior muted expectations. It doesn’t take long for Samsung’s business units to respond to business trends in either direction and we have already heard of increased spending plans on the part of Samsung.… Read More
ASML EUV China Chip Equip Risk
- Is ASML first clandestine shot in US war on China chips?
- Will the action extend further to other chip equip cos?
- China chip cold conflict warming up?
It would appear from a Reuters report yesterday that a behind the scenes “cold war” between the US and China in the chip business has just been exposed and has the potential… Read More
CES 2020: Still no Flying Cars
CES 2020 is being held this week in Las Vegas with over 4,500 exhibiting companies and over 175,000 attendees. The show includes a broader industry than just electronics, which led to it being renamed CES (previously the Consumer Electronics Show) and the sponsoring organization changing its name from the Consumer Electronics… Read More
IEDM 2019 – IBM and Leti
IBM and Leti each presented several papers at IEDM including a joint nanosheet paper. I had the opportunity to sit down with Huiming Bu, director of advanced logic & memory tech and Veeraraghavan Basker, senior engineer from IBM and then in a separate interview Francois Andrieu, head of advanced CMOS laboratory and Shay Reboh,… Read More
China’s chip making impact hits DRAM first
The Doctrine of Eternal Recurrence- (Nietzsche..) Deja’ Vu all over again…
The semiconductor industry has seen this movie before, several times….new entrant into the memory chip industry, disrupts the status quo and goes on to dominate the industry (until the next new entrant…)
The Japanese did it… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet