You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please,
join our community today!
The worldwide revenue of semiconductor industry has remained flat in last few years; to be more precise, overall semiconductor revenue declined by 1.9% in 2015 and Gartner forecasts it to further decline by 0.6% in 2016. The total revenue was at record high of $340.3 billion in 2014.
Well, semiconductor industry has matured. A … Read More
When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI.… Read More
Security threats are the biggest concern among the main concerns on the Internet of Things. Due to its very nature, it is a target of interest for those who want to commit either industrial or national espionage. By hacking into these systems and putting them under a denial of service, or other attacks, an entire network of systems… Read More
In one of my whitepapers “SoCs in New Context – Look beyond PPA”, I had mentioned about several considerations which have become very important in addition to power, performance, and area (PPA) of an SoC. This whitepaper was also posted in parts as blogs on Semiwiki (links are mentioned below). Two important… Read More
With use cases expanding, the meaning of “automotive qualified” semiconductors is changing. What we’re now hearing about now is beyond the AEC-Q100 Grade 0 upper end of 150°C, while still meeting other reliability, retention, and security requirements. What does hypergrade mean for complex digital chip… Read More
There’s a good article in the March issue of the Communications of the ACM which follows a theme I commented in my “One, Two Many” post. But the CACM article has a better title: “Automation should be like Iron Man, not Ultron”.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, Iron Man is a man (Tony Stark)… Read More
The impact of process variation at advanced nodes is increasing — no surprise there. In recent years, the principal design emphasis to better reflect this variation has been the adoption of two new methodologies: (1) advanced on-chip variation (AOCV, as well as POCV/LVF) for digital static timing analysis, and (2) advanced… Read More
One of the more annoying (ie. delightful) things about Tesla Motors is the way the company casually disrupts long established auto industry business models. Whether it is vehicle sales and service or overcoming EV range anxiety or using your car to as an extension of the power grid or letting your car drive itself.
The latest twist… Read More
Next week is the Mentor U2U Conference in Silicon Valley. By chance I had coffee with one of the U2U keynote speakers while we were waiting for the FD-SOI Symposium to start last week and can tell you this FREE event is one you don’t want to miss:… Read More
In the 1999 comedy, The Spy Who Shagged Me, Dr. Evil laments about why he can’t have sharks with “laser beams” attached to their heads. I get the feeling that silicon photonic designers sometimes feel the same way about why they don’t yet have integrated on-chip laser light sources. While off-chip light… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet