This week it was announced that Fairchild Semiconductor was sold to On Semiconductor for $2.4B. The end of an era. As I look back at my career of 36 years with the only company that I have worked for since graduating college, I can’t help but feel a bit sad but extremely grateful for the wonderful experience that Fairchild has … Read More
Six Ways Your Car Can Be Hacked!
The question is not IF but WHEN your car will be hacked. How about this: You connect your smartphone to your car and malware sets off the airbags. My car has front, side, and rear airbags so that would be a very painful and expensive experience for sure. According to my mechanic this is certainly possible and it would cost more than $10,000… Read More
ON to acquire Fairchild: pioneers join together
Last week ON Semiconductor announced it had agreed to acquire Fairchild Semiconductor for $2.4 billion. The combined company will be a major player in power analog and power discretes. It also combines two companies with ties to the beginning of the semiconductor industry.
Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 when eight… Read More
Intel 2015 Analyst Meeting Debunked!
Bill Holt’s “Advancing Moore’s Law” presentation at the recent Intel Analyst day was swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the mainstream media fish so let me play devil’s advocate here and point out some problems with his spin on the competitive landscape.
Coincidentally, one of my Intel friends insists that Intel is number one … Read More
Security Coprocessor Marks a New Approach to Provisioning for IoT Edge Devices
The advent of security coprocessor that offloads the provisioning task from the main MCU or MPU is bringing new possibilities for the Internet of Things (IoT) product developers to secure the edge device at lower cost and power points regardless of the scale.
Hardware engineers often like to say that there is now such thing as software… Read More
Globalfoundries 22FDX Technology Shows Advantages in PPA over 28nm Node
I really enjoy ARM Techcon when it rolls around every year because it has such a wide range of topics and exhibits. You can find maker gadgets, IoT information, small boards for industrial control, software development kits, semiconductor IP vendors as well as the big EDA players and foundries. This year after perusing the exhibit… Read More
Intel Analyst Day – More Capex-Less Losses- PCs Slow/Stabilizing- More M&A?
Like other semi stocks we could see a relief rally as the analyst day is likely to be better than previous news flow- Not much new to tell. Most all of the bad news has been wrung out of the stock- 10nm delays, slowing PCs, tablet losses- the bar has been reset on most issues to “beatable levels”.… Read More
When Talking About IoT, Don’t Forget Memory
Memory is a big enough topic that it has its own conference, Memcon, which recently took place in October. While I was there covering the event for SemiWiki.com I went to the TSMC talk on memory technologies for the IoT market. Tom Quan, Director of the Open Innovation Platform (OIP) at TSMC was giving the talk. IoT definitely has special… Read More
28nm FD-SOI: A Unique Sweet Spot Poised to Grow
I have been silently watching STMicroelectronics pursuing FD-SOI technology since quite a few years. FinFET was anyway getting more attention in the semiconductor industry because of several factors involved. But from a technology as well as economic perspective there are many plus points with FD-SOI. I remember my debate,… Read More
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant
In part one of this blog I described a visit to GlobalFoundries (GF) Fab 8 site in Malta New York by Daniel Nenni and myself. In this part 2 of the blog, I will describe the second day of our trip when we visited Fab 9 in Burlington Vermont. Before we got to Burlington I thought it would likely be a letdown after seeing the state-of-the-art… Read More
MediaTek Develops Chip Utilizing TSMC’s 2nm Process, Achieving Milestones in Performance and Power Efficiency