The LETI and STMicro have demonstrated a DSP that can hit 500 MHz while pulling just 460mV – that’s ten times better than anything the industry’s seen so far. Implemented on a 28nm FD-SOI technology, with ultra thin forward body biasing (UTFBB) capability (used to decrease Vth), this DSP can also be exercised at higher voltage when… Read More
The Infamous Intel FPGA Slide!
As I have mentioned before, I’m part of the Coleman Research Group so you can rent me by the hour to better understand the semiconductor industry. Most of the conversations are by phone but sometimes I do travel to the East Coast, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China for face-to-face meetings. Generally the calls are the result of an event … Read More
Internet of Things and the Wearable Market
My wife and I drove to Southern California last week in search of information on the wearable computing market. After stops in Irvine, San Diego, and some play time in La Jolla we returned in time for the CASPA Symposium: “The Wearable Future: Moving Beyond the Hype; the Search for the Holy Grail and Practical Use Cases”… Read More
450mm Delayed and Other SPIE News
Last week I attended the SPIE Advanced Technology Conference. There were a lot of interesting papers and as is always the case at these conferences, there was a lot of interesting things to learn from talking to other attendees on the conference floor.
The first interesting information from the conference floor was that 450mm is… Read More
Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More
Gobi, the Jewel in Qualcomm’s Crown
Back in the 1990s in the middle of the 2G GSM era, cell-phone manufacturers would display a “triangle of difficulty” with a large base labeled radio, a middle smaller part labeled baseband and a little triangle on top labelled software. The idea was that the radio was incredibly difficult, then the baseband chip and… Read More
GlobalFoundries Fab 8: Jobs
GlobalFoundries was created by spinning out the manufacturing side of AMD’s semiconductor business. Initially the company was jointly owned by AMD and by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) which is an investment arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A couple of years ago ATIC bought out the remaining share from… Read More
SmartConnect goes five by five for the IoT
OK, enough with octa-core mobile monstrosities for now. Let’s shift gears to Embedded World 2014 and the lower end of the spectrum, one that will make up the vast majority of devices on the Internet of Things: tiny, low power microcontrollers with integrated wireless connectivity.
There still seems to be some stigma about putting… Read More
A Brief History of STMicroelectronics
STMicroelectronics is the result of the 1987 marriage between famed semiconductor companies SGS Microelettronica of Italy and Thomson-CSF Semiconductor of France. You may recognize the name SGS-Thomson which was replaced by STMicroelectronics in 1998. After the merger SGS-Thomson was ranked as number 14 in the top 20 semiconductor… Read More
TI’s Way of Strategies – Formation & Execution
For a company to stand still and continually prosper even after facing several downturns in its career of 80+ years, and still move swiftly with strong commitment and confidence, its strategy has to be right and rock solid possessing sustainable competitive advantage, and of course it has to be an early mover in everything it does… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet