There are always debates on who does what best in the semiconductor industry, but most agree that Intel is the best in process and transistor technology. This leadership has served the company extremely well over the last few decades and allowed them to reach a position of dominance in the PC and server semiconductor markets. In … Read More
What Will Kill ROP Cyberattacks?
IBM recently announced a software-oriented solution to help eradicate Return Oriented Programming (ROP) malware attacks. ROP is a significant and growing problem in the industry. Crafty hackers will use snippets of code from other trusted programs and stitch it together to create their attacks. It has become a very popular… Read More
The Status and Future of FDSOI
I recently took a look at the current status and future direction of FinFET based logic processes in my Leading Edge Logic Landscape blog. I thought it would be interesting to take a similar look at FDSOI and to compare and contrast the two processes. My Leading Edge Logic Landscape blog is available here.… Read More
Top 5 Highlights from the 2016 TSMC Open Innovation Platform Forum
Recently, TSMC conducted their annual Open Innovation Platform forum meeting in San Jose. Although TSMC typically eschews a theme for the forum, David Keller, EVT TSMC North America, used a phrase in his opening remarks that served as a foundation for the rest of the meeting – “celebrate the way we collaborate”.
The forum begins… Read More
ESL Architectural Power Estimation Support from TSMC — yes, TSMC
Electronic system level (ESL) modeling for system architecture exploration is rapidly gaining momentum. The simulation performance requirements for hardware/software co-design are demanding — an abstract model for SoC IP cores is required. Typically, soft IP will include a number of model configuration parameters.… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES Extends the FDSOI Roadmap
On September 8, 2016 GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) announced their 12nm FDSOI technology node. On September 12th I had a chance to interview Greg Bartlett, GF Senior Vice President for the CMOS Business Unit (as a side note, GF has: RF SOI, ASIC and CMOS business units).… Read More
FREE Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry!
As most of you know SemiWiki published a book which is a really nice history of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. Thousands of people have copies, we have received many compliments on it, and we are very proud. As a thank you to all SemiWiki members I would like to offer a free electronic version of the book (PDF). You can access it… Read More
GlobalFoundries Roadmap Update 2016!
I attended a lunch yesterday with GlobalFoundries CEO Sanjay Jha (formerly of Qualcomm), SVP Gregg Barltlett (Motorola/GF), and CTO Gary Patton (IBM). Having followed GF from the very beginning I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that GF has transformed from a collection of companies (AMD, Chartered, IBM) to a fully integrated… Read More
Intel Stratix 10 MX FPGA Highlights
These days, FPGAs are fairly complex pieces of silicon. Being that the case, it would take several articles even to put a summary of the features embedded in high-end FPGA devices. Hence, in this article, I will concentrate in just one feature, namely, the new embedded memory blocks of the recently released Intel-Altera Stratix… Read More
TSMC 16nm, 10nm, 7nm, and 5nm Update!
Word on the street is that TSMC is on schedule with 16FFC, 10nm and 7nm, which is a very big deal for the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. As Scotten Jones has illustrated in the graphic below, for the first time in the history of the semiconductor industry a pure-play foundry (TSMC) will have the process lead over Intel. And this is… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot