GlobalFoundries has positioned FDSOI proposal -22FDX- to provide better performance and power dissipation than competitive FDSOI offers on 28nm node. The FDSOI licensing agreement between LETI and GlobalFoundries is only a couple of months old (July 2015), but the real work has started in Dresden as several engineers from … Read More
Wafer-Level Chip-Scale Packaging Technology Challenges and Solutions
At the recent TSMC OIP symposium, Bill Acito from Cadence and Chin-her Chien from TSMC provided an insightful presentation on their recent collaboration, to support TSMC’s Integrated FanOut (InFO) packaging solution. The chip and package implementation environments remain quite separate. The issues uncovered in bridging… Read More
EUV sees further delays?
Headwinds which will likely continue into 2016…
ASML reported revenues of 1.55B Euros with EPS of 0.75 Euros more or less in line with expectations. Orders were the weak spot, falling to 904M Euros versus the previous Q2 orders of 1.523B Euros. The company guided Q4 revenues to be down about 10% to 1.4B Euros below current flattish… Read More
BATTERYGATE: Is Apple’s Samsung made iPhone 6S Core Rotten?
By this time, anyone with a pulse in the tech industry knows that Apple has dual sourced the A9 processor for the Iphone 6S, from both Samsung and TSMC. There are even apps to tell whether your 6S has a Samsung or TSMC part in it. People have run performance comparisons and concluded that the processing performance is the same, which … Read More
Cadence Outlines Automotive Solutions at TSMC OIP Event
I used to joke that my first car could survive a nuclear war. It was a 1971 Volvo sedan (142) that was EMP proof because it had absolutely no semiconductors in the ignition system, just points, condensers and a coil. If you go back to the Model T in 1915 you will see that the “on-board electronics” were not that different. However, today’s… Read More
Secured SAM A5D4 MCU for Industrial, Fitness or IoT Display
The new SAMA5D4, ARM Cortex-A5-based, expands the SAMA5 microprocessors family, adding a 720p resolution hardware video decoder to target Human Machine Interface (HMI), control panel and IoT applications when high performance display capability are required. Cortex-A5 offers raw performance of 945 DMIPS (@ 600 MHz) completed… Read More
Moore’s law limitations and gravitational collapse at lower process nodes
As stated in my previous article, about the complexity of the SOC with billions of transistors. It is essential to consider the real practical scenario for the two dimensional verses three dimensional structure of the chip. Although the new technological changes and evolution for the shrinking process node can create ease for… Read More
Samsung Device Solutions Has a New Home
Last week it was the formal opening of Samsung’s new office building in North San Jose. They have brought together all of semiconductor device solutions in a huge new office building. The building can hold 2000 people. Samsung Device Solutions consists of:
- memory
- system LSI
- LED
- display
Dr OH Kwan, the CEO of Samsung Electronics,… Read More
EUV – So late to the party it may already be over!
Stocks in the semiconductor equipment space continue to fall only this time along with the broad market. We had recently pointed out that LRCX was the last to fall among the large cap companies in the space but now the question becomes when have they fallen enough to say its over, and which stocks have more to fall……
ASML… Read More
Xilinx Skips 10nm
At TSMC’s OIP Symposium recently, Xilinx announced that they would not be building products at the 10nm node. I say “announced” since I was hearing it for the first time, but maybe I just missed it before. Xilinx would go straight from the 16FF+ arrays that they have announced but not started shipping, and to the… Read More
Quantum Computing Technologies and Challenges