Years ago my good friend Herb Reiter promoted the importance of 2.5D packaging to anybody and everybody who would listen including myself. Today Herb’s vision is in production and the topic of many papers, webinars, and conferences. According to Herb, and I agree completely, advanced IC packaging is an important technology for… Read More
What does a Deep Learning Chip Look Like
There’s been a lot of discussion of late about deep learning technology and its impact on many markets and products. A lot of the technology under discussion is basically hardware implementations of neural networks, a concept that’s been around for a while.
What’s new is the compute power that advanced semiconductor technology… Read More
High Performance Ecosystem for 14nm-FinFET ASICs with 2.5D Integrated HBM2 Memory
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) systems have been successfully used for some time now in the network switching and high-performance computing (HPC) spaces. Now, adding fuel to the HBM fire, there is another market that shares similar system requirements as HPC and that is Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially AI systems doing… Read More
Open Silicon Year in Review 2017
If you are interested in what types of chips we will see in the coming years always ask an ASIC provider because they know. Companies of all sizes (small-medium-large) use ASIC companies to get their chips out in the least amount of time and at a minimum cost because that is what ASIC companies do.
IP is an important ingredient to the … Read More
Global Semiconductor Market Trends ISS 2018
One of the other blog worthy analyst presentations at ISS 2018 was by Len Jelinek of IHS. Len is my kind of analyst, he spent 28 years in the semiconductor industry before going to the dark side so he knows what he is talking about. Len’s presentation on Global Semiconductor Market Trends is action packed so I will be doing a lot of cut … Read More
IEDM 2017 – Controlling Threshold Voltage with Work Function Metals
As I have said many times, IEDM is one of the premier conferences for semiconductor technology. On Sunday before the formal conference started I took the “Boosting Performance, Ensuring Reliability, Managing Variation in sub-5nm CMOS” short course. The second module in the course was “Multi-Vt Engineering… Read More
Wanted by January 30th: Paper for DAC IP Track 2018!
DAC 2018 will take place in San Francisco in June (24 to 28) and you have a fantastic opportunity to present a paper in the IP track! In fact, the deadline has been extended to January 30[SUP]th[/SUP] to submit your proposal.
Let’s make it clear: you are not expected to send the completed paper by this date, just the following:
- The title
Autonomous Automobile Update ISS 2018
As a car enthusiast and a semiconductor professional the latest automotive trends are of great interest to me. My father raced sports cars and I remember being part of the pit crew (but not really) and impatiently waiting for my turn to drive. The years before my 16[SUP]th[/SUP] birthday when I could legally drive were the slowest… Read More
ISS 2018 – The Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain
I was invited to give a talk at the ISS conference on the Impact of EUV on the Semiconductor Supply Chain. The ISS conference is an annual gathering of semiconductor executives to review technology and global trends. In this article I will walk through my presentation and conclusions.… Read More
A Reliable Way to Forecast Growth of Semiconductor Markets
Wally Rhines, President and CEO of Mentor, a Siemens Group, did another one of his famous deep learning presentations at SEMI ISS 2018. Using the Gompertz Curve Lifecycle to forecast the future growth of semiconductor markets, Wally looks at: Image sensors, Desktop PCs, PC Notebooks, Cell Phone Subscribers, Smartphones, and… Read More


Intel to Compete with Broadcom and Marvell in the Lucrative ASIC Business