A couple of days ago Intel announced a collaboration with eASIC. Here is the opening paragraph of the press release:Intel Corporation today announced plans to develop integrated products with eASIC Corporation that combine processing performance and customizable hardware to meet the increasing demand for custom compute … Read More
Samsung Foundry Update!
It is hard to believe that Samsung is celebrating their 10[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary in the foundry business this year. It certainly has not been an easy road but as of late you cannot argue with the results. Samsung is the first foundry to put 14nm silicon into smart phones, beating the #1 semiconductor company (Intel) and the #1 … Read More
Quark Adds Muscle to Intel in the IoT World
We have been hearing about Intel’s Quark processor, which is based on its good old Pentium, making waves in IoT world. The CPU core of Quark is said to be the smallest in Intel. It is supposed to be inexpensive and extremely low in power; a perfect combination for IoT devices. The Pentium architecture equips the processor to perform… Read More
What is Real SAMV71 DSP Performance in Auto Audio?
Why selecting ARM Cortex-M7 processor based Atmel SAMV70/71 for automotive entertainment application? The top three reasons are the Cortex-M7 clock speed (300 Mhz), the integration of a floating point (FPU) DSP and, last but not least because Atmel SAMV70/71 has obtained automotive qualification. If you dig into SAMV70/71… Read More
What is Real SAMV71 DSP Performance in Auto Audio?
Why selecting ARM Cortex-M7 processor based Atmel SAMV70/71 for automotive entertainment application? The top three reasons are the Cortex-M7 clock speed (300 Mhz), the integration of a floating point (FPU) DSP and, last but not least because Atmel SAMV70/71 has obtained automotive qualification. If you dig into SAMV70/71… Read More
Smartphones in Q1. Sammy Back On Top
Because it is such a major impact on the semiconductor industry, being the largest and fastest growing market ever, I follow the ups and down of the mobile industry. So what happened in Q1?
Total shipments are up 2% to a record (for Q1) 440 million units but that is down 16% from Q4 which remains the biggest quarter ever.
First thing is… Read More
The Curious Case of Samsung’s Shannon Chips
The recent teardowns of Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphone have one thing written all over them: Samsung is doubling down on its logic business. Although most of the technology press coverage went to Exynos 7420, the first mobile SoC manufactured at the 14nm FinFET process, Samsung’s other logic chips inside the S6 handset equally… Read More
TSMC 10nm Readiness and 3DIC
At the TSMC Technology Symposium last month Suk Lee presented a lot of information on design enablement. Suk is an interesting guy with a unique background in ASIC, Semiconductor, EDA, and now Foundry. In baseball terms that would be like playing infield, outfield, home plate, and umpire!
Around the turn of the millennium Suk actually… Read More
Why Intel will Never Succeed in IoT Market?
Let me precise that by “IoT” I think about the IoT devices market, made of hundreds of application, wearable gadget to medical, home automation, and so on. One direct consequence of IoT (device) market explosion will be the strong growth of the server market (cloud), to transfer, compute and store information generated by the billions… Read More
Extending Moore in Silicon
A year ago many eulogized the death of Moore’s Law at 28nm due to higher prices per transistor at more advanced nodes, but now that we have celebrated the 50th anniversary let’s look ahead to technology scaling and electronic systems miniaturization for the next decade. Despite our industry’s bipolar tendencies and daunting technical… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography