It appears so. Why there is so much rush towards FD-SOI in recent days? Before talking about the game, let me reflect a bit on the FD-SOI technology first. The FD-SOI at 28nm claims to be the most power-efficient and lesser cost technology compared to any other technology available at that node. There are many other advantages from… Read More
Further Delays for Intel 10nm?
Intel’s 10nm may be reliving the 14nm elongated delay issue-
Schedules & tool delivery may be pushed even deeper into 2016-
Meanwhile Samsung & TSMC press on-
Could Intel be embarrassed?
… Read More
Extending EUV Lithography
I have previously written about SPIE day 1 and 2 so I want to wrap up my coverage with some impressions from days 3 and 4. My single biggest take away from the conference is that EUV has made tremendous progress in the last 12 months. Last year the mood of the conference was in my opinion pessimistic with respect to EUV, this year the mood… Read More
eSilicon@Samsung: ASIC Design, IP Enablement, and Cloud Platform
Earlier this week at DAC, Javier DeLaCruz of eSilicon presented at the Samsung booth. They presented an introduction to what eSilicon does. However, since what they do has changed over the years it is useful to recap. If you know about eSilicon then you probably think of them as a fabless ASIC company. The old ASIC model back in the … Read More
DAC Keynote: Moore’s Law Isn’t Dead
There were two keynotes at DAC this morning. I think the official designation of the first one was a “visionary talk” and the main difference was that it was only 15 minutes long. Vivek Singh, an Intel fellow, talked about Moore’s Law at 50: No End in Sight.
He started with a graph showing transistor speed versus… Read More
TSMC Shows 10nm Wafer!
If you really want to know why I write about TSMC it is all about ego, my massive ego, absolutely. Blogs about TSMC and the foundries have always driven the most traffic and they most likely always will. Semiconductor IP is second, Semiconductor Design is third, and I don’t think that is going to change anytime soon:
SemiWiki BI: Daniel… Read More
GlobalFoundries Adds RF to 28nm
The internet of things (IoT) or internet of everything is a term that is into the red zone on the hype-meter. But it does genuinely have something of substance behind the hype. The thing that is a little deceptive is that the IoT term makes it sound like it is a market, but in fact it is several different markets: medical, automotive, … Read More
Why is Intel going inside Altera for Servers?
You should be happy to listen that Intel will buy Altera FPGA challenger, if you expect always more power to be consumed in datacenter! In 2013 the power consumption linked with the Servers and Storage IC activity, plus the electricity consumed in the systems cooling these high performance chips has reached 91 BILLION KWh (or the… Read More
Changing Trends at the Top of Semicon Space
As we have moved down from a CAGR of ~9% over last three decades to a CAGR of ~5% in the current decade, it’s time to check the realities. It can be definitely argued that a 5% of CAGR over a solid base of ~$378 billion should be considered good enough. In my view that’s the sign of maturity in the semiconductor market. At the same time we are… Read More
Semiconductor Acquisitions will Fuel Innovation!
Has the semiconductor world gone acquisition crazy? It certainly seems that way with the more than $60B in M&A activity which may now include Altera. We are probably getting close to the 80/20 rule where 80% of the semiconductor revenue is being generated by 20% of the companies. Not far off from where we were at 25 years ago when… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet