In the past, I’ve focused my annual predictions on electronics – ICs and EDA – but recently I’ve turned my focus to photonics, so my 2020 predictions are primarily in this area.
Historically, photonics has been the Gallium Arsenide of technologies; it was, is and always will be the technology of the future. Analysts have forever … Read More
IEDM 2019 had the theme: “Innovative Devices for an Era of Connected Intelligence” of which MRAM is a leading contributor. Following a very informative Plenary Session, Monday afternoon led off with Session 2: Memory Technology – STT-MRAM. This session has seven important STT-MRAM papers describing the progress of this … Read More
On Tuesday night of IEDM, Applied Materials held a panel discussion “The Future of Logic: EUV is Here, Now What?”. The panelists were: Regina Freed, managing director at Applied Materials as the moderator, Geoffrey Yeap, senior director of advanced technology at TSMC, Bala Haran, director of silicon process research at IBM, … Read More
IEDM is in my opinion the premiere conference for information on state-of-the-art semiconductor processes. In “My Top Three Reasons to Attend IEDM 2019” article I singled out the TSMC 5nm paper as a key reason to attend.
IEDM is one of the best organized conferences I attend and as soon as you pick up your badge you are handed a memory… 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
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 August 27, 2018, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) announced that they were no longer going to compete in the race to the next smaller semiconductor node, at that time, the 7nm node. While surprising to some, on further analysis this move made sense. TSMC had announced its plan to invest around $25B in the 5nm technology node. GF revenue is … Read More
Hard to believe but it’s the 10th anniversary of Globalfoundries. What a journey this has been. It truly has been an honor to work with GF over the years as they invested many billions of dollars in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and added a colorful chapter in semiconductor history, absolutely.
We have written hundreds of … Read More
Surrogate Wars
Is GloFo using the trade war as an excuse?
Does TSMC get lumped in with China on trade?
Does this alienate TSMC into China’s embrace?
Much like Vietnam and Korea before it, there have been a number of “surrogate” wars between the US and China as well as many other wars between the US and Russia using… Read More
Last year at Semicon I sat down with Soitec and got an update on the company. You can read my write up from last year here. A key point last year was Soitec was continuing to be profitable and grow after several years of financial struggles.
On Thursday, July 11th I got to sit down with Soitec’s CEO, Paul Boudre and get an update on… Read More
