Over the past few weeks, there have been numerous reports about Nvidia’s overtures to acquire Arm. The news has mostly been obsessed about the $31 billion that Arm’s current owner, Softbank, paid for Arm and whether Nvidia could pay such an eye-watering price to buy this asset. There is also pushback from Herman Hauser who was one… Read More
We always warn clients that even in the best of times, Joint Ventures (JVs) in China always end in tears. And we are far from the best of times right now. There is a major example of this playing out right now with Arm China.
Arm’s China JV is, to put it simply, a bit of a mess. The Board has fired the CEO, but he has refused to leave. And owing… Read More
In this third article about China’s role in the global semiconductor industry I analyse the current state of affairs of the Chinese semiconductor industry in different segments. In the previous articles, I looked at the possible effects of a US-China decoupling in the semiconductor industry and the impact of the Big … Read More
There is an adage that says that quality is not something that can be slapped on at the end of the design or manufacturing process. Ensuring quality requires careful thought throughout development and production. Arguably this adage is more applicable to the topic of Design for Test (DFT) than almost any other area of IC development… Read More
It’s amazing to think that Apollo moon mission used computers that were based on magnetic core memories. Of course, CMOS memories superseded them rapidly. However, over the decades since, memory technologies have advanced significantly, in terms of density, power and new types of technologies, e.g NAND Flash. Ever since the… Read More
Arguably the cloud was the quickest road to riches for chip designers large and small. As an emerging company, if you wanted to raise money just put “Datacenter” in your pitch deck and you were assured millions. You would be competing with semiconductor’s version of David and Goliath (AMD and Intel) but that was a good thing, right?… Read More
In a joint presentation given by Samsung, Arm, and Cadence at the Arm TechCon event on October 9, 2019, Cadence showed some results and explained its collaboration project used to implement the new Arm Hercules CPU on Samsung’s advanced 5LPE process. I do not want to minimize the significance of Samsung’s and Arm’s participation… Read More
I previously blogged on the GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) Technology Conference (GTC) held in Santa Clara, CA. The main takeaway that I shared in that blog was that GF’s announced “pivot” to a specialty foundry announced over a year ago, including its decision not to pursue 7nm and smaller nodes, appears to be working and GF is gaining momentum.… Read More
On Wednesday, October 9, 2019, I had the pleasure of spending the day at ARM Techcon at the San Jose Convention Center. In the morning, in addition to getting some sneak peeks into the exhibitor area, I attended some of the morning keynote presentations, which focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) topics.… Read More
The server market has been undergoing changes in the last few years. The traditional go-to for server processors had been x86 based chips from Intel or AMD. However, if you go on Amazon AWS looking for EC2 instances, you will see the “A1” instance type, which is an ARM based instance. This is not what you might think at first. The A1 instance… Read More
