At TSMC’s latest earnings call held mid January 2014, an analyst asked TSMC for a revenue forecast for their emerging 2.5/3D product line. C.C. Wei, President and Co-CEO answered: “800 Million Dollars in 2016 ”. TSMC has demonstrated great vision many times before. For me, an enthusiastic supporter of this technology, this statement… Read More
What will drive MEMS to drive I-o-T and I-o-P?
By I-o-P, I mean Internet-of-People- I couldn’t think of anything better than this to describe a technology which becomes your custodian for everything you do; you may consider it as your good companion through life or an invariably controlling spy. This is obvious with the embedded sensor techno-products such as Kolibree, a … Read More
Is Altera Leaving Intel for TSMC?
There is a rumor making the rounds that Altera will leave Intel and return to TSMC. Rumors are just rumors but this one certainly has legs and I will tell you why and what I would have done if I were Altera CEO John Daane. Altera is a great company, one that I have enjoyed working with over the years, but I really think they made a serious mistake… Read More
ESD at TSMC: IP Providers Will Need to Use Mentor to Check
I met with Tom Quan of TSMC and Michael Beuler-Garcia of Mentor last week. Weirdly, Mentor’s newish buildings are the old Avant! buildings where I worked for a few weeks after selling Compass Design Automation to them. Odd sort of déja vu. Historically, TSMC has operated with EDA companies in a fairly structured way: TSMC … Read More
Just Released! Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry
The book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” is now available in the Kindle (mobi) and iBooks (ePub) formats. We are really looking forward to your feedback before we go to print in March. This was truly a Tom Sawyer experience for me. As the story goes Tom made whitewashing a fence seem like fun so his friends… Read More
TSMC Responds to Intel’s 14nm Density Claim!
TSMC responded to Intel’s 14nm density advantage claim in the most recent conference call. It is something I have been following closely and have written about extensively both publicly and privately. Please remember that the fabless semiconductor ecosystem is all about crowd sourcing and it is very hard to fool a crowd of semiconductor… Read More
Intel is NOT Transparent Again!
Recent headlines suggest that Intel was not transparent about some of the products they showed at the CES keynote. Intel confirmed on Friday that they used ARM-based chips for some of the products but would not say which ones. When your company’s tag line is “Intel Inside” and you hold up a product during your keynote wouldn’t… Read More
Is Intel the Concorde of Semiconductor Companies?
An Intel executive recently told me that my Intel articles on SemiWiki are used to motivate employees to work hard and prove me wrong. The converse is also true. The senseless Intel fabless ecosystem bashing motivates me to continue to write so it is a win-win scenario, absolutely. In fact, I should credit Intel’s Mark Bohr… Read More
Technology Challenges: Intel, IBM, Xilinx, GlobalFoundries, IMEC
I spent the day at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay. The early part of the day was devoted to technology challenges. Obviously everyone did not say exactly the same things, and had a little bit of a different spin depending on what business they are in. But there was a lot of commonality between Intel, IBM, Xilinx… Read More
Why SOI is the Future Technology of Semiconductor
No doubt that FDSOI generate high interest these days and I found a very interesting contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D, Inc. Zvi has accepted to share his wrap-up from IEDM, in a blog for Semiwiki readers. If you remember the long discussion we had in Semiwiki about cost comparison, some comments were… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet