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
Streamlining Functional Verification for Multi-Die and Chiplet DesignsAs multi-die and chiplet-based system designs become more…Read More
S2C Advances RISC-V Ecosystem, Accelerating Innovation at 2025 Summit ChinaShanghai, July 19, 2025 — S2C, a leader in functional…Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to DebugThe immediate appeal of large language models (LLMs)…Read More
What XiangShan Got Right—And What It Didn’t Dare TryAn Open ISA, a Closed Mindset — Predictive…Read More
Thread is why Nest has extra 802.15.4 goodies
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
Connect with India at SEMICON West
“Connect with India” was a very successful event this year at Semicon West. Bettina Weiss (Vice President of Business Development at SEMI) organized this event. Along with several dignitaries from Indian government and its upcoming semiconductor industry, there were several semiconductor industry professionals… Read More
Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET
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
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
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
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!
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
Imec’s Process Secret Decoder Ring
To wrap up Semicon West, let’s go back to Monday and the imec presentations. In fact, An Steegen’s presentation titled The Semiconductor Roadmap. She covered a lot of ground, but some of her slides contain a wealth of information. Let’s look at the options for 10nm, 7nm and a little 5nm, what imec call N10, N7 and… Read More
GlobalFoundries: Upcoming Events
GlobalFoundries is running a series of technical seminars in the US and Europe, following on from the successful versions run last month in Shanghai and Hsinchu. Among the topics that will be discussed are Foundry 2.0 and Collaborative Device Manufacturing for both Leading Edge and Mainstream technologies. The European events… Read More
Should the US Government Invest in Intel?