As I see the semiconductor industry going through significant changes and advances, yet ironically plagued by a growing perception that the pace of scaling is slowing, I was inclined to take a peek into what the industry experts say about the state of the industry and the future of Moore’s Law. Fortunately, at last week’s International… Read More
TSMC: 3D, 450mm, CoWoS and More
The first keynote at the Burlingame 3D conference was by Doug Yu of TSMC. Not surprisingly he was talking about 3D. In particular, TSMC has WLSI technology that they call CoWoS, which stands for chip-on-wafer-on-substrate which pretty much describes how it is built. This is the technology that Xilinx uses for its recently announced… Read More
Should Intel Offer Foundry Services?
This has been a heated topic since Intel announced that it would open its manufacturing facilities to the fabless ecosystem more than a year ago. I for one think it is a colossal mistake and I’m not surprised that many others share this view. IDM’s offering of excess manufacturing capacity to semiconductor design companies… Read More
Could FD-SOI be Cheaper too?
We agree now that FD-SOI technology is Faster, Cooler, Simpler. But can it also be a cheaper technology? Let start with an overview of the current estimation of the development cost for complex SoC on advanced technology nodes. The following data are extracted from International Business Strategies, Inc 2013 report. The first… Read More
The Leading Edge Depends on What You Are Doing
At Semicon Japan a few days ago, Subi Kengeri of GlobalFoundries delivered the keynote. While he covered a number of topics, using Tokyo’s recent win of the 2020 Olympics as a hook, one major theme was the increasing importance of processes other than the bleeding edge digital processes that get all the news.
What is leading… Read More
Intel Comes Clean on 14nm Yield!
Hopefully this blog will result in a meaningful discussion on truth and transparency, and how Intel can do better in regards to both. Take a close look at the manufacturing slides presented by William Holt, Executive Vice President General Manager, Intel Technology and Manufacturing Group. You can see the slide deck HERE. Slide… Read More
Intel’s Tale of Two Cities
It was a year ago that Paul Otellini made his surprise announcement that he was stepping down as CEO of Intel. Soon after, I wrote an article asserting that the only correct choice for his replacement was Nvidia’s CEO Jen Hsun Huang. I went beck to reread what I wroteand I can scarcely say I would change anything I put in the article assuming… Read More
Intel Bay Trail Fail II
To follow up my Bay Trail Fail blog which predicted that the leading edge Intel 22nm mobile SoC offering would fail, I must admit I was wrong. I did not think Bay Trail would see any traction in the tablet market but, as it turns out, Intel will ship 40M of those parts in 2014. Did you notice I said ship and not sell? Read on……… … Read More
Intel’s Mea Culpa!
The Intel analyst meeting last week reads like an absolute train wreck with INTC stock dropping 5%+ the very next day. Since I work in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem during the day I was not able to listen to it live like the other pundits. Nor am I as easily fooled by Power Point slides. I did however review the materials and would… Read More
QCOM delivers first TSMC 20nm mobile chips!
QCOM is now sampling the TSMC 20nm version of its market dominating Gobi LTE modem. The announcement also included a new turbo charged version of their 28nm Snapdragon 800 SoC with a Krait 450 quad core CPU and Adrino 420 GPU. Given the comparable benchmarks between the Intel 22nm SoC and the 28nm SoCs from Apple and QCOM, the new 20nm… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot