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Intel Second Quarter Results

Intel Second Quarter Results
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 4:03 pm

Intel announced their quarterly results earlier this week. Their mainline microprocessor business is doing well, especially the highest performance segments for servers, datacenters and cloud computing. Broken down by segment the numbers come out like this:

  • PC Client Group revenue of $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially
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Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing

Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing
by Daniel Payne on 07-16-2014 at 3:00 pm

Test engineers are often the unsung heroes in the semiconductor world, because they have the tough job of deciding if each IC is good or bad, while taking the least amount of time on a tester and ensuring that the tests are actually finding and uncovering all manufacturing and process variation defects. Simple stuck-at fault models… Read More


Andes Plays an ACE

Andes Plays an ACE
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 9:01 am

There is a perception that ARM is the only microprocessor game in town due to their strong position in many markets, especially mobile. In areas where the instruction set shows through, then this is probably true. There is no rush to build smartphones where the application processor is something else. But even in a phone there are… Read More


Thread is why Nest has extra 802.15.4 goodies

Thread is why Nest has extra 802.15.4 goodies
by Don Dingee on 07-15-2014 at 4:00 pm

From last week: “Chipmakers can’t afford to wait on the sidelines, hoping their standard fare gets picked up and fits in with one of these [#IoT]teams.” This week, it’s ARM, Freescale, and Silicon Labs joining with Google and others on Thread. Yet another consortium? A lot more to this story.… Read More


Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET

Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET
by Eric Esteve on 07-15-2014 at 4:21 am

How to synthesize a pretty good article Is SOI Really Less Expensive, and even more important the impressive amount of comments (56) generated? Let’s start with the initial article. Pretty good, but slightly biased, when you carefully dissect it, like I did in one of the comments (you can find it in-extenso at the end of this post).… Read More


Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction

Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 pm

Today Cadence announced their next generation extraction solution called Quantus QRC. Actually they are technically announcing it tomorrow, since it is being announced at CDNLive in Korea where it is already Tuesday morning.

As with the other recently announced tools that end in -us, Tempus (timing signoff) and Voltus (power… Read More


EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest

EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 am

All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More


Paving the Path for Robust Electronic System Design

Paving the Path for Robust Electronic System Design
by Pawan Fangaria on 07-13-2014 at 7:30 pm

In today’s era of low power and high performance components, preferably on a single chip provides impetus to much larger electronic systems packaged into much smaller cases; smartphones are the immediate examples which encapsulate multiple functions other than the intended ones, viz. phone and data communication. As an example,… Read More


The iPhone6 will have TSMC 20nm, Absolutely!

The iPhone6 will have TSMC 20nm, Absolutely!
by Daniel Nenni on 07-13-2014 at 11:00 am

TSMC 20nm is one of the most talked about nodes on SemiWiki with lots of speculation and debate surrounding it. It’s interesting to look back at what we thought would happen to see if it actually did happen so let’s do that now. According to Google there are 411 articles referencing 20nm on SemiWiki, let’s visit a couple of the… Read More