Daniel Nenni recently blogged about Intel’s claims of industry leading process density that were made at their analysts meeting. It isn’t clear to me why Intel makes this such a big focus at the analysts meetings, they really don’t compete with the foundries much but this seems to be a big deal to them. I thought it would be interesting… Read More
Tag: 14nm
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution
Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More
GlobalFoundries 14nm Process Update
Last Monday Daniel Nenni and I had a conference call with Jason Gorss and Shubhankar Basu of Global Foundries to get an update on their 14nm process. Shubhankar is the product line manager for 14nm.
Global Foundries 14nm process is a FinFET on bulk process they licensed from Samsung and both companies supply the same process although… Read More
SEMI SMC: Atoms Still Don’t Scale
Last Tuesday was the SEMI’s annual Strategic Materials Conference (SMC). The opening keynotes were given by Gary Patton, the CTO of GlobalFoundries, and Mark Thirsk, Managing Partner of Linx Consulting. This year it was held in the Computer History Museum (which always makes the commute interesting since you have to fight… Read More
My Experience with the Ultra Thin 2015 MacBook
Before we left for our 5 week trip to Europe I decided that I would need a real laptop computer on the road. I knew it would be a near necessity for booking hotels and making train reservations. Also, I would need to write emails and maybe even pay some online bills. I already have an iPad but really wanted to be able to run all my applications… Read More
SEMICON West 2015 Recap – Day 1 – Softening Markets, Sub 14nm and 3D NAND
Tuesday morning press briefing
The show started for me Tuesday morning with the SEMI press briefing. SEMI said there are 1,200 booths this year, 629 exhibiting companies and over 180 hours of programming. They also said pre-registration was up from last year and they expect 26,000 visitors.
Dan Tracy then gave an update on the markets.… Read More
Who Needs to Lead at the 14, 10 and 7nm nodes
IBM recently disclosed a working 7nm test chip generating a lot of excitement in the semiconductor industry and also in the mainstream media. In this article I wanted to explore the 14nm, 10nm and 7nm nodes, the status of the key competitors at each node and what it may mean for the companies.
Synopsy Eats Their Own Dogfood
One of the most interesting presentations that I went to was the last presentation at the Synopsys Custom Lunch (no, the lunch wasn’t custom, we all got the same, but the presentations were about custom design). Since the last presentation was by Synopsys themselves and not by a customer, it wouldn’t seem promising that it could … Read More
Heard on the Street at ITF
As I said yesterday, I’m at the imec Technology Forum (ITF) in Brussels. So what have I learned from all the people that I’ve interacted with.
There were two press releases announced at a press conference yesterday. The first was that imec was expanding its relationship with Toshiba and Sandisk. This covers bringing… Read More
Samsung: the Journey to 14nm and 10nm
At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More