When you drive a car off the dealer’s lot, you own the whole vehicle, right? For decades, car owners have popped the hood and crawled under the car to do their own maintenance; and for those mechanically inclined, even make modifications to improve performance or handling. However, in an era where a car is increasingly controlled… Read More
Arteris Highlights a Path to Scalable Multi-Die Systems at the Chiplet SummitAt the recent Chiplet Summit, presentations, discussions and…Read More
Captain America: Can Elon Musk Save America's Chip Manufacturing Industry?Intel has posted three consecutive years of falling…Read More
WEBINAR: Reclaiming Clock Margin at 3nm and BelowAt 3nm and below, clock networks have quietly…Read More
WEBINAR: HBM4E Advances Bandwidth Performance for AI TrainingThe rapid proliferation of LLMs and other AI…Read More
Siemens Wins Best in Show Award at Chiplet Summit and Targets Broad 3D IC Design EnablementThe recent Chiplet Summit in Santa Clara was…Read More
Forget about ThunderBolt, USB Type C is here!
At the early days of Semiwiki (March 2011), I wrote about ThunderBolt, predicting low market adoption of the protocol, for various reasons. One of these reasons was the cost associated with ThunderBolt integration by the OEM. Even if the protocol (associating PCI Express and DisplayPort) was offering better data bandwidth than… Read More
A moment of IoT silence before we disrupt
As I sat down in the SEMI Arizona Chapter breakfast meeting a few weeks ago, a moment of semiconductor history flew right before my eyes before the IoT sessions started.
We were seated in the cafeteria of Freescale Building 94 on Elliot Road in Tempe, a place I’d been many times before, except this time may have been the last. NXP is consolidating… Read More
What do Rockets and GF Fab 8 Have in Common?
An interesting thing happened during the driving tour of the GlobalFoundries Fab 8 in Malta, NY. We happened by an old structure with quite a bit of history. As it turns out, the “Malta Test Station”, a former US Army fuel and explosives testing facility, was the actual birthplace of the United States’ Space & Missile programs.… Read More
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution
Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More
What Makes Us Indecisive?
An indecision is actually a very bad decision. It is an implicit decision for the status quo. It is worse than an explicit decision regardless of how bad that decision turns out to be. In my experience, our indecisiveness is caused by various reasons involving trade-offs.… Read More
Moore’s Law Linear Approximation and Mathematical Analysis!
Respected Gordon Moore has given the real computing power to the world and Respected Stephen Hawking’s work from past many years has given the reality of physics and mathematics to the universe. We can imagine the shrinking and intelligence in computing due to the real evolution of semiconductor technology. The process… Read More
The Revenge of Microprocessor Design: The Return of the Macro
(Two Star Wars™ allusions in one title – eat your heart out George Lucas.) Most of us are comfortable with the idea that you design more or less whatever you want in RTL and let the synthesis tool pick logic gates to implement that functionality. Sure it may need a little guidance here and there but otherwise synthesis is more or less … Read More
China Further Expands Its Influence in Semiconductor Industry
For the fourth consecutive year, China’s semiconductor consumption growth far exceeded worldwide market growth. At the end of 2014, the country had a record 56.6% of the global semiconductor consumption market.
China’s semiconductor consumption grew by 12.6% in 2014, exceeding the worldwide chip market growth of 9.8%. To … Read More
Moore’s Law and Silicon Forest
When I first moved to Oregon in 1978 the largest industry was forestry, but then the endangered Spotted Owl was found and that put an end to many forestry companies and decimated the economy of many rural cities. Strangely enough it turns out that the Spotted Owl was found in great numbers across multiple states, so it never should’ve… Read More
Silicon Insurance: Why eFPGA is Cheaper Than a Respin — and Why It Matters in the Intel 18A Era