Any article or blog on mobile phones talks about the ongoing battle between Apple and Samsung or the never ending struggle of Nokia and Blackberry. These reports are primarily based on the US market that hosts close to 322 million mobile subscriptions as per report in DEC 2012 by mobiThinking. With 81% (256 million) of the US population… Read More
Apple’s iPhone 17 Series 5G mmWave Antenna Module Revealed to be Powered by Soitec FD-SOI SubstratesRecent independent teardown and technical analyses have confirmed…Read More
Advancing Automotive Memory: Development of an 8nm 128Mb Embedded STT-MRAM with Sub-ppm Reliability IEDM 2025 Papers MRAM…Read More
AI Drives Strong Semiconductor Market in 2025-2026The global semiconductor market in 2025 was $792…Read More
How Customized Foundation IP Is Redefining Power Efficiency and Semiconductor ROIAs computing expands from data centers to edge…Read More
Akeana Partners with Axiomise for Formal Verification of Its Super-Scalar RISC-V CoresAkeana Inc. announced a key milestone in the…Read MoreSynopsys Magma Acquisition Stock Trading Under Investigation?
An attorney from the Division of Enforcement at the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission contacted me in regards to activity on SemiWiki. Not a great way to start a Monday! Given the parameters of the discussion and the type of questions it is undoubtedly (in my humble opinion) concerning the Synopsys acquisition of Magma.… Read More
Video? Tensilica Has You Covered
Video is a huge growing area and advanced imaging applications are becoming ubiquitous. By “advanced” I mean more than just things like cameras in your smartphone. There is lots more coming, from high-dynamic range (HDR) photography, gesture recognition, more and more intelligent video in cars to keep us safe, … Read More
Assertion Synthesis: Atrenta, Cadence and AMD Tell All
Assertion Synthesis is a new tool for verification and design engineers that can be used with simulation or emulation. At DVCon Yuan Lu of Atrenta is presenting a tutorial on Atrenta’s BugScope along with John Henri Jr of Cadence explaining how it helps emulation and Baosheng Wang of AMD discussing their experiences of the… Read More
Magic? No! It’s Computational Lithography
The industry plans to use 193nm light at the 20nm, 14nm, and 10nm nodes. Amazing, no? There is no magic wand; scientists have been hard at work developing computational lithography techniques that can pull one more rabbit out of the optical lithography hat.
Tortured metaphors aside, the goal for the post-tapeout flow is the same… Read More
Want 10nm Wafers? That’ll Cost You
As you know, I’ve been a bit of a bear about what is happening to wafer costs at 20nm and below. At the Common Platform Technology Forum last week there were a number of people talking about this in presentations and at Harvey Jones’s “fireside chat”.
At the press lunch I asked about this. There are obviously… Read More
Cadence Sigrity, Together At Last
In July Cadence acquired Sigrity, one of the leaders in PCB and IC packaging analysis. Until a decade ago, signal integrity and power analysis was something that only IC designers needed to worry about. For all except the highest performance boards, relatively simple tools were sufficient. Provided you hooked up the pins on all… Read More
Apple’s Ma Bell Moment
The wreckage that is Apple’s stock is a surprise to many including yours truly but it appears to mark the beginnings of a transition period that will result in freeing the company from the demands of Wall St as it appeals to the broader population of mainsteam America. I call it the Ma Bell Strategy. Unlike Microsoft or Intel, Apple … Read More
Cosmic Circuits acquisition by Cadence: IP battle with Synopsys has officially started!
If you have missed the announcement that Cosmic Circuits has been acquired by Cadence, dated February 7, you may want to read this PR. In any case, by reading this article you will understand why this acquisition is ringing the start of the “IP battle” between cadence and Synopsys. Let me remind you that I said in Semiwiki last September… Read More
Please Help Me Understand IBM – Common Platform Technology Forum 2013
“Innovations for Next Generation Scaling”
The 2013 Forum today (Feb 5, 2013) started with a presentation by Dr. Gary Patton, VP, IBM Semiconductor Research & Development Center. Gary very clearly articulated the two irresolvable challenges the industry now faces:
- On chip interconnect
- Lithography
These … Read More


A Detailed History of Samsung Semiconductor