5G is in the news again. Sprint has mounted a legal challenge against ATT, claiming that ATT is misleading people into believing that they already are offering 5G. While ATT is about to start testing of 5G, they have also sent out updates that causes customer phones to display 5GE when they are still on 4G LTE systems. The truth is that… Read More
Strong Overall Market Growth but a Slowdown Looms
After six years of single digit percentage growth in the overall semiconductor market, 2017 saw almost 22% growth and 2018 year-to-date is up roughly 17% (based on numbers published by the world semiconductor trade statistics). The big growth driver the last two years has been … Read More
China has always been an intriguing semiconductor puzzle that very few companies have solved and now it is much more puzzling with the current political meandering. The GlobalFoundries vision of having foundries all over the world was very appealing to me back in 2009 and even more so today. Remember, China consumes more than half… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) recently announced they were abandoning 7nm and focusing on “differentiated” foundry offerings in a move our own Dan Nenni described as a “pivot”, a description GF appears to have embraced. Last week GF held their annual Technology Conference and we got to hear more about the pivot from new CEO Tom Caulfield… Read More
It’s no secret that I have been a big fan of GLOBALFOUNDRIES since they came about in March of 2009. We even included them in our first book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry” right next to TSMC. I am also a big fan of pivoting which is the term we use here in Silicon Valley to describe some of the most innovative… Read More
One of my favorite traditions at the Design Automation Conference is the Synopsys foundry events (the videos are now available). I learned a long time ago that the foundries are the foundation of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and your relationships with the foundries can make or break you, absolutely. I also appreciate … Read More
At SEMICON West I attended the imec technology forum, multiple Tech Spot presentations and conducted a number of interviews relevant to advanced lithography and EUV. In this article I will summarize what I learned plus make some comments on the outlook for EUV.… Read More
FDSOI is gaining traction in the market place. At their foundry forum in May, Samsung announced they have 17 FDSOI products in high volume manufacturing (you can read Tom Dilliger’s write up of the Samsung Foundry Forum here). At SEMICON West in July, GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF) announced FDSOI design wins worth $2 billion dollars in … Read More
A variety of growing and emerging segments of the semiconductor industry rely on Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) wafers. Soitec is the primary source for SOI wafers particularly on 300mm. On Tuesday at SEMICON I got to sit down with Bernard Aspar, Soitec’s Executive Vice President, Communication & Power BU and Christophe… Read More
The 2018 VLSI Technology conference was held in Hawaii in June and is one of the premier conferences covering integrated circuit process technology and circuit design. The Complementary FET (CFET) is an emerging option to continue logic scaling into the next decade. At the conference imec, GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Tokyo Electron and… Read More
