The Common Platform Alliance — IBM, Samsung Electronics, Co., Ltd., and GLOBALFOUNDRIES — continues to redefine the landscape of the semiconductor industry with its groundbreaking collaboration. Join us at our 2013 Common Platform Technology Forumon Tuesday, February 5, 2013 at the Santa Clara Convention Center as we showcase… Read More
It has been a year since my article Semiconductor Landscape in Jan 2012 I wanted to look back into the major events over the year and then anticipate what’s in store going forward. What has happened over the year is much more than what I could foresee. Major consolidation in EDA space – Synopsys acquired Magma, SpringSoft, Ciranova,… Read More
Since the beginning of the semiconductor industry, improving the rate of yield learning has been a critical factor in the success silicon manufacturing. Each fab has dedicated yield teams that look at the yield of wafers manufactured the previous day and attempt to find the root cause of any unexpected “excursions.” In earlier… Read More
When a company develops chip for the military industry, I would prefer these chips to be using a 100% reliable technology. I am sure that you too! For certain application, 99%, or even 99.99% rate of confidence is not enough. Would you accept to fly in an airplane if you still have 1 out of 10,000 chances to crash? Would you accept living… Read More
Clearly the key to success in the foundry business is partnerships. Easy to say, harder to do, here is an excellent example of one that works: GLOBALFOUNDRIES and ARM announced in August 2012 a multi-year agreement to jointly deliver optimized system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for ARM® processor designs on GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 20-nanometer… Read More
At DAC 2012 GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Solido presented a user track poster titled “Understanding and Designing for Variation in GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28-nm Technology” (as was previously announced here). This post describes the work that we presented.
We set out to better understand the effects of variation on design at 28-nm. In particular,… Read More
Today GlobalFoundries announced a 14nm process that will be available for volume production in 2014. They are explicitly trying to match Intel’s timeline for the introduction of 14nm. The process is called 14XM for eXtreme Mobility since it is especially focused on mobile. The process will be introduced just one year after… Read More
In response to changing industry dynamics, AMD announced in October 2008 a new strategy to focus exclusively on the design phase of semiconductor product development. To achieve that strategy, AMD partnered with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi to create a new joint venture company designed to become… Read More
There’s a new blogger in town, Kelvin Low from GLOBALFOUNDRIES. Kelvin was a process engineer for Chartered Semiconductor before moving on to product marketing for GF. His latest post talks about the GF 28nm SLP which is worth a read. There was quite the controversy over this Gate-First HKMG implementation of 28nm that IBM/GF/Samsung… Read More
As a fitting postscript to my “Brief History of the Fabless Semiconductor Industry”, semiconductor research company IC Insights compiled a list of the top semiconductor companies for the first half of 2012. As the traditional IDMs go fabless and sink in the ratings, the foundries post record gains led by TSMC at 22%, GlobalFoundries… Read More
