Mobile World Congress (MWC) is the world’s largest gathering of mobile industry innovators where one can hear the latest on advanced technologies and solutions. This year, it took place from February 27 through March 2. Soitec was there to share their insights on how mobile communications are going to evolve with 5G and beyond … Read More
3DIC Physical Verification, Siemens EDA and TSMC
At SemiWiki we’ve written four times now about how TSMC is standardizing on a 3DIC physical flow with their approach called 3Dblox, so I watched a presentation from John Ferguson of Siemens EDA to see how their tool flow supports this with the Calibre tools. With a chiplet-based packaging flow there are new physical verification… Read More
Advances in Physical Verification and Thermal Modeling of 3DICs
If, like me, you’ve been paying too little attention to historically less glamorous areas of chip design like packaging, you’ll wake up one day and realize just how much things have changed and continue to advance and how interesting it’s become.
One of the main drivers here is the increasing use of chiplets to counter the decreasing… Read More
Samsung- full capex speed ahead, damn the downturn- Has Micron in its crosshairs
-Samsung said its not reducing its capex despite downturn
-A clear indication they want to take share/kill Micron & others
-Is the US government subsidizing predatory chip behavior?
-The last US memory chip maker is clearly threatened
Samsung announces worst results in 8 years
Samsung released its earnings which were the… Read More
Samsung Ugly as Expected Profits off 69% Winning a Game of CAPEX Chicken
-Samsung off the same chip cliff as Micron- “No skid marks”
-Samsung may be winning at a game of “Capex Chicken”
-No expectation of recovery any time soon – Consumers weak
-2023 a write off- Recovery will be delayed if spending isn’t
Samsungs worst quarter in 8 years no surprise
Samsung pre… Read More
IEDM 2022 – TSMC 3nm
TSMC presented two papers on 3nm at the 2022 IEDM; “Critical Process features Enabling Aggressive Contacted Gate Pitch Scaling for 3nm CMOS Technology and Beyond” and “A 3nm CMOS FinFlexTM Platform Technology with Enhanced Power Efficiency and Performance for Mobile SOC and High Performance Computing Applications”.
When … Read More
TSMC OIP – Analog Cell Migration
The world of analog cell design and migration is quite different from digital, because the inputs and outputs to an analog cell often have a continuously variable voltage level over time, instead of just switching between 1 and 0. Kenny Hsieh of TSMC presented on the topic of analog cell migration at the recent North American OIP … Read More
IEDM 2022 – Ann Kelleher of Intel – Plenary Talk
Ann Kelleher is Intel’s Executive Vice President, General Manager, Technology Development, and she gave the first plenary talk to kick off the 2022 IEDM, “Celebrating 75 Years of the Transistor A Look at the Evolution of Moore’s Law Innovation”. I am generally not a fan of plenary talks because I think they are often too broad and… Read More
Achieving 400W Thermal Envelope for AI Datacenter SoCs
Successful ASIC providers offer top-notch infrastructure and methodologies that can accommodate varied demands from a multitude of customers. Such ASIC providers also need access to best-in-class IP portfolio, advanced packaging and test capabilities, and heterogeneous chiplet integration capability among other things.… Read More
Samsung Versus TSMC Update 2022
After attending the TSMC and Samsung foundry conferences I wanted to share some quick opinions about the foundry business. Nothing earth shattering but interesting just the same. Both conferences were well attended. If we are not back to the pre pandemic numbers we are very close to it.
TSMC and Samsung both acknowledged that there… Read More


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