Next week is the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference in San Jose, the premier conference for advanced lithography used to produce state-of-the-art semiconductors. Last year I blogged after the conference about some of the key points I heard at the conference and this year I plan to do the same.
Freescale and Samsung
It is impossible to keep a secret in this business. Everyone knows that Freescale is being shopped around and there is interest.
From Yahoo Finance:
The parties that Freescale is speaking to could not be learned. The New York Post first reported that Freescale was working with investment banks to explore a sale. Freescale shares… Read More
7nm node is arriving, which ones will continue past 2020?
‘Laughing Buddha’ is eternal, but for semiconductor industry, I must say it’s ‘laughing Moore’. Moore made a predictive hypothesis and the whole world is inclined to let that continue, eternally? When we were at 28nm, we weren’t hoping to go beyond 20/22nm; voices like ‘Moore’s law is dead’ started emerging. Today, we are already… Read More
Greetings from Digitopia!
When it comes to the privacy and security of data, what does the future hold for consumers, companies and governments?
A tremendously interesting document, called “Alternate Worlds,” was published by the U.S. National Intelligence Council. It’s a serious document that not only examines four different alternatives of what … Read More
AMAT Earnings Call: Next Generation FinFETs?
The Applied Materials earnings call was last week. As usual I”m not all that interested in the financial details of the quarter and I’m certainly not the person to pick whether the stock is going to go up or down in the immediate future. However, there is always interesting information to be gleaned from the semiconductor… Read More
TSMC 20nm Essentially Worthless?
It happens at every process node, professional journalists write that something is broken and blames TSMC like a worn out record. To be fair they are not semiconductor professionals with access to the fabless semiconductor rank and file and are easily manipulated which is what happened again at 20nm. Remember when NVIDIA suggested… Read More
Do You Need a Silicon Catalyst?
Lately there has been significant concern over the rising costs of designing in silicon and the troubling decline in venture investments in semiconductors. These alarming trends include fewer IPOs, a falloff in the amount and frequency of early stage seed investments, and comparatively low industry organic growth rates. A … Read More
TSMC’s OIP: Everything You Need for 16FF+ SoCs
Doing a modern SoC design is all about assembling IP and adding a small amount of unique IC design for differentiation (plus, usually, lots of software). If you re designing in a mature process then there is not a lot of difficulty finding IP for almost anything. But if you are designing in a process that has not yet reached high-volume… Read More
TSMC vs Samsung!
One of the trending topics in Taiwan last week is the escalating conflict between Samsung and TSMC. This time however it is of a legal nature which has been a long time coming for the semiconductor industry. Reverse engineering has been an integral part of the semiconductor business since the beginning, as has intellectual property… Read More
Sony Endorse FD-SOI to Attack Wearable & IoT
We are writing about FD-SOI technology since the beginning of 2013 in Semiwiki. So far, most of the design experience was related to ST-Microelectronics (even if IBM and GlobalFoundries have been actively working on the technology, probably more on a research mode than pure production). Sony being actively working to develop… Read More
Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding is Here