When GlobalFoundries first briefed me on 22FDX during a trip to Dresden in 2015, China was one of the first things that came to mind. The China semiconductor market was still on 28nm and FinFETs seemed far away for the majority of the Chinese fabless companies. A low cost, low power, low complexity 22nm process with a path to 12nm (12FDX)… Read More
Tag: fd-soi
Everything a Designer Wants to Ask About FDSOI
So you’ve got questions about FD-SOI? For chip designers in Silicon Valley, there’s a great opportunity to get answers from some of the world’s leading design experts. It’s coming up fast: April 14th, the SOI Consortium is organizing a full day of FDSOI tutorials for chip designers. Bear in mind that … Read More
GlobalFoundries Makes Pure-Play Foundry Great Again!
The pure-play foundry business just got stronger and so did semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. As we all know, the fabless semiconductor industry started by utilizing extra capacity from traditional semiconductor manufacturers (IDMs). However, putting your designs in the hands of a competitor is not a good … Read More
It’s All About the Models
The world-renowned statistician, Professor George Box, said, “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” — that quote was the theme for one of the technical talks at the recent MOS-AK Workshop, held at UC-Berkeley. … Read More
Always-On IoT – FDSOI’s Always Better? What About Wafers? (Questions from Shanghai)
Mahesh Tirupattur, EVP at low-power SERDES pioneer Analog Bits lead off the panel discussion at the recent FD-SOI Forum in Shanghai with the assertion that for anything “always on” in IoT, FD-SOI’s always better. They had a great experience porting their SERDES IP to 28nm FD-SOI (which they detailed last spring – see the ppt here… Read More
GlobalFoundries Enhances FDSOI Roadmap with 12FDX
Last year, GlobalFoundries filled the competitive gap by offering FD-SOI technology on 22nm, offering better performance than 28nm, you may have read about the news in Semiwiki. Timing is important, as Samsung has announced FD-SOI support one year before (2014) GlobalFoundries, but for 28nm. The announcement made by GlobalFoundries… Read More
Semi execs look at IoT tradeoffs a bit differently
What happens when you get a panel of four executives together with an industry-leading journalist to discuss tradeoffs in IoT designs? After the obligatory introductions, Ed Sperling took this group into questions on power, performance, and integration.… Read More
One transistor for the future of mmWave?
We’ve heard recently from several sources that millimeter wave radios, once the exclusive realm of defense and satellite use, are now finding homes in applications such as automotive radar and 5G networks. Therein lies a significant opportunity for digital design: moving frequency conversion and filtering from the analog … Read More
More Details on the Smartphone and Wearables Market
The Linley Mobile Conference opened today with a nice keynote overview of the mobile market evolution. In the media I see a lot of doom and gloom articles about smartphones and wearables but if you look at it closely you will see a natural growth curve evolving.
The mobile semiconductor market is evolving as vendors split their focus… Read More
LETI Day 2016 : Security in Lyon, Sensor at Semicon West on July 12th
It was the very first time I attended the LETI days, even if I know the research center for many years. LETI was created in the 60’s, as the subsidiary of the CEA (France agency in charge of Atomic Energy) in charge of Microelectronic. Now, for more than 50 years, 2000 research engineers are working to develop technologies, systems … Read More