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Intel said Monday that it will turn its factories into an “independent subsidiary” with its own board of directors, a historic step that opens the door to severing the company into two pieces, a semiconductor manufacturing business and a separate organization to design computer chips.
It’s a...
It's quite typical when a large company like Intel acquires smaller Habana Labs in 2019 for the acquired founders to stick around for a short while, then leave, but only after their stock options have vested. Big companies tell you what to do, while at a new startup you get to decide your own...
I worked at Intel from 1982 to 1986 when they:
Froze hiring
Cut all salaries by 10%, across the board
Asked all salaried employees to work 2 more hours per day at no pay
Did shut-downs, causing employees to file for unemployment benefits
About 1/3 of the company quit
Uh, her LinkedIn profile has no company name mentioned, at the top it says Austria, but then it also says Munich area. Her education was in Russia. A more credible person would certainly list the name of their company,, and the list of chips and foundry nodes that they have designed. She does...
Nice tech story, however these non-technical communicators are often unable to distinguish between designing an SoC versus building or fabrication of the SoC. AWS will design their Graviton4 chips, while TSMC will build or fabricate the SoC. The video segment was set in a facility where...
I don't have a subscription to the WSJ, so couldn't read the article. SoftBank paid way too much money for Arm at $32B in 2016, so let's see what the IPO raises.
In the 1970s my title at Intel was Circuit Designer, which at that time meant that I designed DRAM chips at the transistor level. Another job title was Logic Designer, and they worked with gates. Eventually with languages like Verilog and VHDL, the title was RTL Designer. Newer titles are SoC...
I also asked ChatGPT, "Who is Daniel Payne", and it produced so many mistakes that its replies are quite untrusted. Why the industry has fallen for ChatGPT is a bit mystifying to me, with so many fabrications in the answers.
I worked at Intel from 1982 to 1986 when they:
Froze all hiring
Froze all pay raises
Gave everyone a 10% pay cut
Finally, asked everyone to work 2 hours/day extra, without pay
In those four years about 25% of the company simply quit, including me, so I joined my first EDA company in 1986. It's...
Bitcoin mining typically uses many GPU servers to perform mathematical calculations in order to earn a new bitcoin. When a bitcoin is deposited into an account, then it is stored in a distributed ledger known as blockchain. So bitcoin is a virtual currency, while blockchain is a software storage...
A quick Google search of SemiWiki finds "Graviton" mentioned 249 times, so yes, AWS and other systems companies are designing their own chips to accelerate domain-specific workloads, because CPUs and GPUs aren't efficient enough.
The Inverter, or NOT gate only has 2 transistors, so would count as half a gate. The CMOS XOR gate can have 12 transistors, so would count as 3 gates. Transistor count is quite precise, and not open to interpretation. Some engineers see ICs as collections of transistors, like me, because I was a...
Logic synthesis tools require a cell library, and each cell has an area assigned to it, but the results of synthesis depend on how you control the tool. If you ask for maximum speed, then synthesis may return a higher gate count along the critical paths, trading off more area for higher speed...
Some chip design companies openly state what their total transistor count is, so it's mostly bragging rights, and they often round to the nearest billion transistors for the largest SoC designs. In the early days of ASICs and FPGA designs, the companies would often cite Gate count, where a Gate...
Taylor, Texas reminds me of Aloha, Oregon, because Intel's first Oregon fab was placed in the tiny community of Aloha in 1974, for exactly the same reasons, tax incentives.
Several companies have announced stacked DRAM chips:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08828
https://www.vikingtechnology.com/dram-modules/dram-memory-stacking/
https://www.slashgear.com/samsung-12-layer-3d-tsv-stacks-12-dram-chips-in-the-same-space-as-8-07594321/...
The average cost of a 180nm mask set is $100,000.00, however that same IC layout, but using 40nm masks will cost you $900,000.00. https://anysilicon.com/semiconductor-wafer-mask-costs/
The gate oxide is thinner for 40nm versus 180nm, which then effects the Vt of the transistor. So moving from...
