I just back from Samsung’s big announcement held at the SFJazz center (very conveniently 15 minutes walk from my place). They put a stake in the ground about their program at the intersection of medicine and health and technology. They had said in advance that they would not announce any new hardware but in fact they did…although… Read More
The Chip Design Game at the End of Moore’s Law
I just came across and interesting video from last year’s Hot Chips conference. Dr. Robert Colwell of DARPA discusses how the processor design industry is likely to change after it becomes too difficult to continue scaling transistors to ever-smaller dimensions. This is likely to occur sometime within the next decade,… Read More
IBM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES Deal!
An interesting deal was announced last week, another piece in the What is Next for GlobalFoundries? puzzle. IBM is sending up to 200 employees from their East Fishkill R&D facility to GF’s Malta R&D center in Saratoga County. The first thing that comes to my mind is 10nm! Considering GF is licensing Samsung 14nm, what else… 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
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
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
Intel’s SoC Challenge!
Innovation is the cornerstone of the semiconductor industry and as history has shown, the majority of semiconductor innovation has come from fabless companies. Apple computer is my favorite example since they went from selling mother boards to computer hobbyists in the 1970’s to being one of the largest and most influential … Read More
Intel’s Manufacturing Lead Explained
The calls from Wall Street keep coming with basically the same set of questions: “Does Intel really have a 2-3 year process lead? Can Intel lead the foundry segment? Can Intel Lead the Mobile SoC Segment?” The feeling amongst the buy and sell side investment people is that unless Intel can lead a market they will not stay in it… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot