This is the first of an occasional series of articles on the semiconductor industry. Many column inches have covered industry consolidation and in this first article, I aim to explain how the industry reached this point. Later articles will cover subjects including China, joint ventures, emerging players like Brazil and Vietnam,… Read More
Tag: intel
Intel’s New Strategy Is The Right One For The Company
Intel has been the focus of a lot of attention in the last week due to the company’s major restructuring announcement which came on the heels of Intel’s most recent earnings announcement. The majority of analyses that immediately followed the company’s announcement focused singularly on the layoffs, which amount to 11% of the … Read More
AMD Forms China X86 Server Chip Joint Venture
We have written a lot of research and notes about the China server market and their unique needs as it relates to security and intellectual property and the ways western server OEMs and chipmakers like Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, ARM Holdings, Qualcomm and IBM’s OpenPOWER are addressing the challenge.
Basically, China wants… Read More
3D NAND – Moore’s Law in the third dimension
For more than a decade 2D NAND has been the leading driver of lithography shrinks, for example, Samsung went from 120nm in 2003 to 16nm in 2014 with shrinks on an almost yearly basis, but the shrinks came at a price. At 16nm Self Aligned Quadruple Pattering (SAQP) was required for the most critical layers and patterning related costs… Read More
Semiconductor capital spending slow in 2016
The outlook for semiconductor capital expenditures (capex) in 2016 is weak. Gartner’s January 2016 forecast called for a decline of 4.7%. IC Insights in February projected a 0.8% decline. The table below shows the Gartner forecast along with the capex forecasts from the top three spenders (Intel, Samsung and TSMC) which… Read More
Why I’ll Always Be an Andy Grove Fan
Silicon Valley sadly lost a respected and revered leader with the death of Andrew Grove in March. The co-founder and former CEO of Intel was an inspiration to generations of technologists and business leaders, including me. Andy had a profound influence on me throughout my career. And while I only met him once, I feel as though I’ve… Read More
Intel And Qualcomm Partner (Yes, Really)
For the longest time, the 802.11ad space, also known as WiGig by others, was a conglomeration of different 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies. There have been many companies that have announced technologies utilizing 60 GHz Wi-Fi technologies including Intel, Nitero, Peraso, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and SiBEAM. Even though many… Read More
EUV is coming but will we need it?
I have written multiple articles about this year’s SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference describing all of the progress EUV has made in the last year. Source power is improving, photoresists are getting faster, prototype pellicles are in testing, multiple sites around the world are exposing wafers by the thousands and more. … Read More
Custom Layout Productivity Gets a Boost
In the 1970’s, when Moore’s Law was still in its infancy, Bill Lattin from Intel published a landmark paper [1]. In it he identified the need for new design tools and methods to improve layout productivity, which he defined as the drawn and verified number of transistors per day per layout designer. He said existing … Read More
Silicon Photonics – Back to the Future – Part Deux?
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