Samsung has plenty to talk about this year at DAC. The FD-SOI partnership with STMicroelectronics for example. Also the Samsung GLOBALFOUNDRIES 14nm partnership. Thus the “Paradigm Shift in the Foundry Supply Chain” theme. Samsung is also leading the pack with giveaways!
Quantom Dots and Semiconductors?
Imagine life without science and great minds that made life worth living! It is personalities like Newton, Thomas Alva Edison, Graham Bell, Alexander, Michael Faraday who have made us realized the true potential of science.
Imagine what would have happened if Newton had not discovered gravity? It is due to gravity that earth revolves… Read More
STM FD-SOI Manufacturing Double Source: Samsung
Let’s start with apologies: when guessing that SMIC would be the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] source foundry for ST-Microelectronics 28nm FD-SOI, I was wrong. To be honest, if I had made the assumption that Samsung was this double source, I would have generated dozen of comments, calling me “crazy blogger”…for the best. Announcing Samsung… Read More
Atmel and the Arduino Zero
As I wrote about last month, this weekend is the Maker Faire in San Mateo. If you are interested in the cutting edge of what people are getting up to outside of the corporate world, this is the place to go. You will see stuff that you will not hear about for a year or two when it finally goes mainstream.
Increasingly, there is a lot of electronics… Read More
Samsung Endorses FD-SOI!
This is probably one of the biggest stories we will cover this month, if not this year, absolutely. In partnership with STMicroelectronics, Samsung will manufacture 28nm FD-SOI chips for the fabless semiconductor community starting now. This proves without a shadow of a doubt that Samsung is serious about the foundry business.… Read More
A Brief History of the Apple MacBook Pro
I’m typing this blog today with my trusty Apple MacBook Pro – a 17″ laptop with matte display and 16GB of RAM, but don’t stereotype me as an Apple fanboy because I also own the fantastic Samsung Galaxy Note II phone (aka phablet). Some industry pundits would have us believe that desktops and laptops are going… Read More
TSMC Updates: 20nm, 16nm, and 10nm!
*Spoiler Alert: The Sky is Not Falling*
The TSMC Technology Symposium last month provided a much needed technology refresh to counter aging industry experts (they make their living selling reports) who have been somewhat negative on the future of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. If the sky wasn’t falling who would… Read More
FD-SOI : SMIC or…Who else?
In fact, as of today, nobody can refer to an official statement made by any STM executive about name of the foundry able to process FD-SOI wafers in 28nm. We just know that the agreement is about to (or has been) signed… But we may speculate, and try to use our rational thinking. For example, the Semiwiki readers had the opportunity to… Read More
Semiconductor Cost Models: Boring But Crucial
One of the most important and underrated tasks in a semiconductor company is creating the cost model. This is needed in order to be able to price products, and is especially acute in an ASIC or foundry business where there is no sense of a market price because the customer and not the manufacturer owns the intellectual property and … Read More
FD-SOI Not Just For France Any More, China Signs On?
The COO of ST Microelectronics, Jean-Marc Chery announced that they have signed a new foundry agreement for FD-SOI. What he actually said doesn’t reveal who the foundry in question is:“We have just signed a strategic agreement with a top-tier foundry for 28nm FD-SOI technology. This agreement expands the ecosystem, assures… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot