The most interesting part of the semiconductor market for me has always been the Custom Chip sector – the FPGA, ASIC and SoC companies where I have spent my entire career. These three segments provide an excellent barometer of the overall state of financial health and technological innovation for the entire High Tech industry, … Read More
Siemens EDA Expands AI and Advanced Packaging Collaboration with TSMCAt the recent TSMC Technology Symposium 2026, Siemens…Read More
PQShield unveils ultra-small PQC embedded security breakthroughs at Embedded World 2026As the threat of quantum computing to modern…Read More
Closing the Silicon Realization Gap: From Static DFM to Governance for Lifecycle (GFL)The semiconductor industry has achieved extraordinary mastery in…Read More
imec IC-Link and TSMC 3DFabric Alliance Expansion Signals New Era of System-Level Scalingimec announced that IC-Link by imec has joined…Read More
From the Selfie to Samantha: The Next Trillion-Dollar BehaviorAt CES 2026, Samsung called it a “companion.”…Read More
eSilicon and IDT Collaborate on Next-generation RapidIO Switches
Earlier in the week, eSilicon and IDT announced a collaboration to accelerate development of next-generation RapidIO switches. These are used to meet the higher performance demands required for new wireless, embedded and computing infrastructures. The two companies will initially work together to develop RapidIO switches… Read More
SemiWiki Big Data Exposed!
You will be hard pressed to attend a conference and NOT hear the term Big Data these days. What is Big Data? One example is the data SemiWiki has collected over the past 3.5 years while more than one million users have passed through our site. My summer project, with my daughter the math major, is to harness this massive pile of data and… Read More
Palladium’s Little Brother Protium
Today, Cadence announced Protium, a new FPGA prototyping platform for software development. During development of an SoC, the most appropriate methodology changes. In the early days, developing RTL, the primary tool is simulation. Then, as the blocks get bigger or as the whole chip starts to come together, typically simulation… Read More
Intel Second Quarter Results
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
Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing
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
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
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
ASML High-NA EUV is Not Ready for High-Volume Production