TSMC doesn’t just sell wafers, it sells trust. It’s the Colgate Ring of Confidence for fabless customers. This focus on trust started at the very beginning when Morris Chang founded TSMC over 25 years ago, and still today trust remains an essential part of their business.
When TSMC started, the big thing it brought … Read More
You may know a bit about Bitcoin, the digital currency. One part of the system is “mining” new bitcoins, analogous to mining new gold when we were on the gold standard, creating “money” out of thin air but at a cost of doing the actual mining.
Here is an interesting aside. When I lived in France the father of… Read More
Qualcomm is the largest fabless semiconductor company in the world. If you have a smarphone there is a good chance you have a Qualcomm chip in your pocket. It is headquartered in San Diego with offices pretty much everywhere.
Qualcomm’s roots are in Linkabit, which was founded by Irwin Jacobs and Andrew Viterbi. They, along with … Read More
Yesterday was Dan Niles’s economic review that he presents quarterly for GSA. As always he starts from big macroeconomic picture and ends up looking at the implications for semiconductor end-markets and thus the implication for semiconductors in general and the fabless ecosystem in particular.
The big picture is that… Read More
I met with Tom Quan of TSMC and Michael Beuler-Garcia of Mentor last week. Weirdly, Mentor’s newish buildings are the old Avant! buildings where I worked for a few weeks after selling Compass Design Automation to them. Odd sort of déja vu. Historically, TSMC has operated with EDA companies in a fairly structured way: TSMC … Read More
The book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” is now available in the Kindle (mobi) and iBooks (ePub) formats. We are really looking forward to your feedback before we go to print in March. This was truly a Tom Sawyer experience for me. As the story goes Tom made whitewashing a fence seem like fun so his friends… Read More
This year marks the 20th anniversary of GSA and collaboration around the foundry and fabless ecosystem. Originally GSA was FSA, the fabless semiconductor association. There was a semiconductor associations 20 years ago, the SIA, but that was still the “real men have fabs” era and fabless semiconductor companies… Read More
Every year the GSA holds the GSA Silicon Summit. This year it is on April 10th at the Computer History Museum. It runs from 9am until 2.15pm. This year the focus is mostly on technologies other than simply scaling semiconductor technology. The meeting is divided into 3 sessions, each of which starts with a presentation and then is … Read More
Today GSA announced the award nominees for the 2013 awards. They will be presented at the GSA Award Dinner on Thursday December 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center. The keynote will be given by Steve Forbes.
Recently it was announced that the 2013 Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award winners are CEO and Chairman, Dr.… Read More
ARM announced their quarterly results early this morning. ARM’s results are a funny mixture of backward looking information such as royalties which are reported a quarter late since they have to wait for their licensees to work out how many they shipped, and some very forward looking such as new licenses, which bring some… Read More
