CEO Interview: Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy of OpenFive 

CEO Interview: Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy of OpenFive 
by Daniel Nenni on 03-05-2021 at 6:00 am

Shafy Eltoukhy

Dr. Shafy Eltoukhy has over 35 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. He served as VP and BU manager of the Analog Mixed Signal Group at Microsemi. He was the VP of Operations and Technology Development at Open-Silicon. He was the VP of Technology at Lightspeed Semiconductor where he joined the founding team that invented… Read More


Podcast EP6: The Traitorous Eight and Fairchild Semiconductor

Podcast EP6: The Traitorous Eight and Fairchild Semiconductor
by Daniel Nenni on 02-05-2021 at 10:00 am

Dan and Mike are joined by John East, a silicon valley industry veteran who takes you on a tour of the very foundation of Silicon Valley and venture capital. John explores the beginnings of these key parts of the world as we know it today and explains who the Traitorous Eight are and what role they played.

Biography
John East retired… Read More


Crashing the Mars Rovers!!! Actel and Aerospace Corp

Crashing the Mars Rovers!!! Actel and Aerospace Corp
by John East on 09-30-2019 at 6:00 am

In early 2003 Actel announced a new product family:  RTSX-A.  It was a family of antifuse FPGAs aimed at the satellite market.  Customers had known for a long time that it was coming and there had been prototypes available for many months.  Our space customers loved the product.  This was going to be a big win for us!  One of the first… Read More


Actel Goes Public – The IPO

Actel Goes Public – The IPO
by John East on 09-23-2019 at 6:00 am

In 1990 Xilinx notified us that they believed Actel was infringing a patent that had just been issued to them.  My immediate thoughts – the patent system is all screwed up!  Actel had been developing our product for five years. We had been shipping it for a year and a half.  During all that time, we were totally unaware that there was … Read More


More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel

More Actel Foundry Woes: Andy Grove and Intel
by John East on 09-16-2019 at 6:00 am

The foundry problem continued to plague us at Actel.  We had a really complex process! But  —- we needed state of the art feature sizes if we were to compete with Xilinx.  TI and Matsushita had been doing a good job for us, but not in fabs with state of the art technology.  We were two process generations behind! At two generations… Read More


Actel TI and TSMC Foundry Woes

Actel TI and TSMC Foundry Woes
by John East on 09-09-2019 at 6:00 am

TSMC was founded in 1987 by Morris Chang.  At about the same time, I was wrestling with the question of whether or not to join Actel.  Morris had been a top executive at Texas Instruments during the period when TI took ownership of the TTL market.  (See my week #8.  Texas Instruments and the TTL Wars)  I have to admit that when I first … Read More


FPGA Landscape Update 2019

FPGA Landscape Update 2019
by Daniel Nenni on 04-01-2019 at 7:00 am

In 2015 Intel acquired Altera for $16.7B changing one of the most heated rivalries (Xilinx vs Altera) the fabless semiconductor ecosystem has ever seen. Prior to the acquisition the FPGA market was fairly evenly split between Xilinx and Altera with Lattice and Actel playing to market niches in the shadows. There were also two FPGA… Read More


A Brief History of FPGAs

A Brief History of FPGAs
by Daniel Nenni on 08-26-2012 at 7:30 pm

From the transistor to the integrated circuit to the ASIC, next comes programmable logic devices on the road to the mainstream fabless semiconductor industry. PLDS started in the early 1970’s from the likes of Motorola, Texas Instruments, and IBM but it wasn’t until Xilinx brought us the field programmable gate array (FPGA)… Read More