Last week I talked to Marco Brambilla of Synapse Design. Synapse is a design services company headquartered in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2003 by Satish Bagalkotkar and has been profitable since the beginning. Today it has over 700 people. In addition to the headquarters in Santa Clara, they have a software group in Colorado,… Read More
ASMC 2015: GlobalFoundries 22nm SOI plans and more!
The Advance Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference was held on May 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] through May 6[SUP]th[/SUP] in Saratoga Springs, New York. ASMC brings a unique operational perspective to technical conferences related to semiconductors. In this blog I wanted to discuss what I thought was the most interesting paper of the… Read More
Analog Market Leaders Eyeing on IoT Applications
When we talk about analog IC market, one can easily guess who the leader with lion’s share in the market is. There are also next level leaders with impressive growth rates in this market. The analog market as such is poised to grow with Internet of Things (IoT) because it supplies some of the key components such as data converters, op… Read More
Intel and eASIC: Marriage or Just Good Friends?
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
The Risk of Not Optimizing Clock Power