GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been evangelizing their 22FDX FD-SOI process for a few months; readers may have seen Tom Simon’s write-up of their preview at ARM TechCon. Dr. Joerg Winkler recently gave an updated webinar presentation of their approach in an implementation of ARM Cortex-A17 core.
By now, you’ve probably heard that 22FDX… Read More
We in Semiwiki are writing about FD-SOI since 2012, describing all the benefits offered by the technology in term of power consumption, price per performance compared with FinFET, etc. Let me assess again that I am fully convinced that FD-SOI is a very smart and efficient way to escape from the Moore’s law paradox: the transistor… Read More
When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI.… Read More
I cut my teeth in silicon IC design at Texas Instruments during the early 1980’s working on what would eventually become the ASIC and Fabless IC industries that enabled the explosive growth of the electronics industry over the last three decades. Of late I’ve become involved in the silicon photonics space and I am getting an incredible… Read More
This was the best keynote lineup I can remember at a user group meeting. All four speakers are visionaries but from very different perspectives. The video of the event will be up later this month but from my first count the word “System(s)” was mentioned 32 times and the underlying message will transform the semiconductor industry… Read More
If you’re in the chip biz in Silicon Valley, check out the SOI Consortium FD-SOI Symposium on April 13th in San Jose. They’ve been running these things since 2009, and I have to say that this one is the most comprehensive to date. Headliners include Cisco, Sony, NXP, SigmaDesigns, ARM, Ciena plus the big FD-SOI foundries,… Read More
In a consolidating semiconductor business environment and innovation in semiconductor fabrication already scaling new heights with existing strong players, where do you think the wafer capacity should concentrate? It’s pure-play foundries or pure-play-like foundries, and those who supply high-volume common components… Read More
It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More
A unique phenomenon has started manifesting itself under the slew of mergers and acquisitions this year in the semiconductor landscape. This phenomenon is bound to intensify in the near future and would positions itself as a key factor for the future of the semiconductor industry. The winners and losers in the game would be determined… Read More
In a recent SemiWiki post, “Why Medical IoT Won’t Take Off,” the author raised some very interesting points on why certain IoT applications won’t succeed. But, it’s important that these points are looked at holistically, within context, and compared to other IoT features that are already improving health by increasing… Read More
