The generosity of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem never ceases to amaze me. Paul McLellan and I wrote a book for the greater good and now key members of our industry will make sure that 1,500 people at this year’s Design Automation Conference will get copies. As a special thank you to all of our supporters SemiWiki will be hosting… Read More


GlobalFoundries Gets a New Manager in NY
GlobalFoundries is on the move. Of course the biggest announcement recently was the licensing of Samsung’s process to run in fab 8 in Malta, New York. This means that fab 8 will be a viable alternative, a true second source for Samsung production and one that doesn’t compete with its customers as Samsung does in many … Read More
EUV Will Never Happen
I had lunch today with a guy who has to remain nameless. But he is on the edge of the semiconductor lithography thing. He told me EUV will never happen. Of course lots of people have said that. Me for one. But he said everyone knows it. The investment community, the foundries, everyone. Intel put money into ASML in the hopes that it would… Read More
A Novel Approach to IC Design in the Cloud
Migration to cloud computing for scientific and engineering applications is inevitable. More specifically for IC design, the benefits are significant:
- Common IC design infrastructure to unburden each user from setting up and maintaining a separate infrastructure
- Cloud based IC design enables global collaboration among
More Moore or No More?
Moore’s is still the law, and device scaling remains the key focus of front-end process research, however next-generation technologies–and the Big Data, cloud computing world that supports mobile, IoT, and other next-gen applications–are the new drivers, bringing new demands and challenges running … Read More
Motley Fools Intel Investors Again!
It really is quite a racket. Investor bloggers spread semiconductor disinformation for $.01 per click, that coincidentally covers their stock positions, and I get paid $300 per hour to explain it to Wall Street. While I appreciate the opportunity to bond with the financial people, I do wonder how these bloggers sleep at night.… Read More
Variation-Aware Custom IC Design Best Practices
I’ve worked with Solido for 5 years, and it’s been a pleasure to watch the world’s top semiconductor companies and foundries adopt Solido software for their SPICE simulation flows.
Sub-28nm design starts are accelerating, growing from 150 in 2012 to 900 this year. The move to sub-28nm design nodes is being driven by consumer electronic… Read More
What’s not quite MCU, and not quite SoC?
There has been a lot of railing lately about how we don’t have quite the right chips for the upcoming wave of wearables. Chips one would drop in a smartphone are often overkill and overpowered, burning through electrons too quickly. Chips one would use for a simple control task generally lack peripherals and performance, offsetting… Read More
Can Intel be a Leading Semiconductor Foundry?
This is the third part of a series answering the most frequently asked questions I get from Wall Street. Please read the previous two articles on Intel’s Manufacturing Lead and Intel’s SoC Challenge before flaming me in the comment section. First let’s look at why there is a foundry business and go from there.
The big… Read More
Jasper at DAC
Wait, didn’t Cadence just acquire Jasper. Why is there a Jasper at DAC post?
So the big event is lunch on Tuesday, on Treasure Island. For out of towners that is the island in the middle of the bay bridge (actually just half of it). Food trucks, awesome views of the bay, and really cool street performers. There will be street magic,… Read More
A Quick Tour Through Prompt Engineering as it Might Apply to Debug