PDF Solutions, Inc. will host an AI Executive Conference Thursday, December 12, in San Francisco featuring keynotes, presentations, panels and demonstrations offering insights into the power of AI to transform semiconductor design and manufacturing. The conference immediately follows the 70th Annual IEEE International… Read More
Last month in Shanghai was a meeting of the FD-SOI consortium. The focus of the meeting was largely on the suitability of using FD-SOI to serve the Chinese market. The fabs in China are not right on the bleeding edge and are very cost-sensitive so 28nm is probably as advanced as they will get for a long time if not indefinitely. China … Read More
40nm was a big node while I was Director of Foundries at the IP company Virage Logic which was later acquired by Synopsys. 40nm was big because the top fabless companies multi-sourced designs from one foundry to another with relative ease to get the best wafer prices. It was also the node where some of the big IDMs went fab-lite moving… Read More
*Spoiler Alert: The Sky is Not Falling*
The TSMC Technology Symposium last month provided a much needed technology refresh to counter aging industry experts (they make their living selling reports) who have been somewhat negative on the future of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. If the sky wasn’t falling who would… Read More
At the SEMI ISS conference earlier this week, the last speaker in the technology challenges section was Handel Jones of IBS. I’ve known Handel since the mid-1980s when he came to VLSI Technology and told us we were losing money on 90% of the designs we were doing but our cost model was not good enough and so we didn’t even… Read More
