No doubt that FDSOI generate high interest these days and I found a very interesting contribution from Zvi Or-Bach, President and CEO of MonolithIC 3D, Inc. Zvi has accepted to share his wrap-up from IEDM, in a blog for Semiwiki readers. If you remember the long discussion we had in Semiwiki about cost comparison, some comments were… Read More
Tag: amd
AMD Goes 3D
I attended the 3D packaging conference in Burlingame this week. The most interesting presentation to me was by Bryan Black of AMD. He argued very convincingly that Moore’s Law is basically over for the PC microprocessor business and the way forward is going to be 3D. AMD are clearly working on all this.
Increased density and… Read More
Revisiting Andy Grove’s "Only the Paranoid Survive"
Over the course of the last fifty years there have been two significant books that have delivered emotional and operational clarity on the rise and fall of high tech companies and industries: The Innovator’s Dilemma and Only the Paranoid Survive. Amazingly, these two books were released within a year of each other (1996, 1997) … Read More
Static Low-Power Verification in Mixed-Signal SoC Designs
IC designer Shubhyant Chaturvediof AMD used EDA tools from Mentor Graphicsand Concept Engineeringto perform static, low-power verification of a mixed-signal SoC design with a combined CPU and GPU. Shubhyant presented a poster session at DAC two weeks ago in Austin, and I wanted to share it with my readers here at SemiWiki.… Read More
AMD Reduces Power by 20%
Steve Kommrusch of AMD wrote a white paper with Calypto on how AMD reduced power by 20% on the Jaguar SoC using Calypto’s PowerPro. Dan Nenni blogged about it on SemiWiki back in February here. And now, drumroll, Steve will present the story live and in person at DAC, on Monday June 3rd at 3pm and on Wednesday June 5th at 11am. This… Read More
A Brief History of the Foundry Industry, part 1
The fundamental economics of the semiconductor industry are summed up in the phrase “fill the fab.” Building a fab is a major investment. With a lifetime of just a few years, the costs of owning a fab are dominated by depreciation of the fixed capital assets (the building, the air and water purification equipment, the manufacturing… Read More
Modeling TSV, IBIS-AMI and SERDES with HSPICE
The HSPICE circuit simulator has been around for decades and is widely used by IC designers worldwide, so I watched the HSPICE SIG by video today and summarize what happened. Engineers from Micron, Altera and AMD presented on how they are using HSPICE to model TSVs, IBiS-AMI models and SERDES, respectively.… Read More
Intel’s x86 – Foundry Breakup Comes into View
The announcement by Intel during their January earnings call that they were going to hike Capex in 2013 over 2012 left many folks scrambling as to the reasons and the what-the hecks? Here was a company that was exiting 2012 with 50% utilization of their advanced 22nm process and yet signaling more building was to come. Furthermore,… Read More
Assertion Synthesis: Atrenta, Cadence and AMD Tell All
Assertion Synthesis is a new tool for verification and design engineers that can be used with simulation or emulation. At DVCon Yuan Lu of Atrenta is presenting a tutorial on Atrenta’s BugScope along with John Henri Jr of Cadence explaining how it helps emulation and Baosheng Wang of AMD discussing their experiences of the… Read More
Semiconductors Down 2.7% in 2012, May Grow 7.5% in 2013
The world semiconductor market in 2012 was $292 billion – down 2.7% from $300 billion in 2011, according to WSTS. The 2012 decline followed a slight gain of 0.4% in 2011. Fourth quarter 2012 was down 0.3% from third quarter. The first quarter of the 2013 will likely show a decline from 4Q 2012 based on typical seasonal patterns and the… Read More