It’s no coincidence that the TSMC Symposium is right after the Q1 earnings call. This will allow TSMC to talk more freely and they certainly will, my opinion. It is a very interesting time in the semiconductor industry and TSMC, being the bellwether, can tell us what will happen the rest of the year and give us some 2020 insights.… Read More




Flex Logix InferX X1 Optimizes Edge Inference at Linley Processor Conference
Dr. Cheng Wang, Co-Founder and SVP Engineering at Flex Logix, presented the second talk in the ‘AI at the Edge’ session, at the just concluded Linley Spring Processor Conference, highlighting the InferX X1 Inference Co-Processor’s high throughout, low cost, and low power. He opened by pointing out that existing inference solutions… Read More
ML and Memories: A Complex Relationship
No, I’m not going to talk about in-memory-compute architectures. There’s interesting work being done there but here I’m going to talk here about mainstream architectures for memory support in Machine Learning (ML) designs. These are still based on conventional memory components/IP such as cache, register files, SRAM and various… Read More
TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 DRAM and Emerging Memories
On the Sunday evening at IEDM last year, TechInsights held a reception in which Arabinda Das and Jeongdong Choe gave presentations that attracted a roomful of conference attendees.
This is the second part of the review of Jeongdong’s talk, we covered NAND flash technology in the last post. Jeongdong is a Senior Technical… Read More
Hogan Fireside Chat with Paul Cunningham at ESDA
If you’re in verification and you don’t know who Paul Cunningham is, this is a guy you need to have on your radar. Paul has risen through the Cadence ranks fast, first in synthesis and now running the verification group, responsible for about a third of Cadence revenue and a hefty percentage of verification tooling in the semiconductor… Read More
Samsung 5nm and TSMC 6nm Update
TSMC and Samsung continue to raise the competitive bar for FinFET foundry market share with dueling announcements this week. As I mentioned previously in the blog Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019, FinFETs are the market to watch with the coming onslaught of 5G and AI chips on the edge, in the cloud, and in our autonomous… Read More
Using ML to Build Efficient Low Power Platforms for Augmented Vision
We are all pretty familiar with augmented reality, where real world images are overlaid with computer generated images, graphics and even audio. Of course, our first exposure to augmented reality might have been images of heads up displays in fighter jets or perhaps in the movie The Terminator. Augmented reality is moving rapidly… Read More
TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 NAND Flash
On the Sunday evening at IEDM last year, TechInsights held a reception in which Arabinda Das and Jeongdong Choe gave presentations that attracted a roomful of conference attendees. Arabinda was first up, giving a talk on the “10-year Journey of Apple’s iPhone and Innovations in Semiconductor Technology”, followed by Jeongdong… Read More
From Wild West to Modern Life the Semiconductor Evolution
What started as blogs, or vignettes as Wally calls them, posted on SemiWiki is now a free PDF eBook. The journey starts with his school days at Stanford through 20+ years at TI and 24+ years at Mentor Graphics. Wally has traveled millions of miles meeting with every customer imaginable while presenting hundreds of different keynotes… Read More
An old IP theft gets a new Chinese label
The Dutch financial newspaper Financieele Dagblad (FD) reported on the past theft of ASML technology after doing some investigative digging. It now appears that a number of Chinese nationals and ASML employees, in ASML’s Santa Clara office stole key technology back in 2015. Though ASML talked about it at the time, little… Read More
What is Vibe Coding and Should You Care?