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
IEDM 2019 – Applied Materials panel EUV Recap
On Tuesday night of IEDM, Applied Materials held a panel discussion “The Future of Logic: EUV is Here, Now What?”. The panelists were: Regina Freed, managing director at Applied Materials as the moderator, Geoffrey Yeap, senior director of advanced technology at TSMC, Bala Haran, director of silicon process research at IBM, … Read More
The Tech Week that was December 16-20 2019
As we approach the end of 2019 I wish everybody a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. This will be my last update for a few weeks as I will also take a little break over the holiday season.
Despite a lot of people winding down for the year, there was still lots of interesting news from last week with lots of data points pointing to an even
The Tech Week that was December 9th 2019
In a week that finally saw some good news in the trade war between US & China, here is a summary of all the key semiconductor and technical news from around the world that you may have missed.
On Friday, US and China announced agreement on the so called phase one agreement, as a result the extra tariffs due to be imposed on S180billion… Read More
The ESD Alliance Honors Mary Jane Irwin
The Phil Kaufman Award has been given annually since 1994 to individuals who have had a significant impact on Electronic System Design. I have attended several of the award dinners during that time. Most of the time (roughly 70%), the award recipients were either people I knew or people whose textbooks I had read. The award goes to… Read More
As 2019 comes to an end everyone is starting to look at what 2020 holds
At the moment there are many encouraging signs based on the latest data. Let’s hope this trend continues into 2002 and 2020 is the year of recovery of the semiconductor market. However much depends on how the US China trade war pans out. Last week Trump blew hot and cold saying everything from the negotiations were going very well to… Read More


Quantum Advantage is About the Algorithm, not the Computer