When I first moved to Oregon in 1978 the largest industry was forestry, but then the endangered Spotted Owl was found and that put an end to many forestry companies and decimated the economy of many rural cities. Strangely enough it turns out that the Spotted Owl was found in great numbers across multiple states, so it never should’ve… Read More
Go off and do something wonderful,” said Robert (Bob) Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild semiconductors and Intel Corporation. He was heard, and the quality of our lives has been elevated by the wonderful pursuits of skilled pioneers. Notice that Bob did not say, “Go off and become great leaders.” This is because great leaders of the… Read More
The world has come through a long way from the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] UNIVAC computer in 1952, IBM mainframes and minicomputers in secured computer rooms to laptops, tablets, mobile phones, and so on in our hands. Imagine the compute power of a minicomputer then and the compute power of your smartphone or tablet today. And do you know the… Read More
Recent reports have Intel displacing Qualcomm as the modem supplier and TSMC as the foundry for the next Apple A10 SoC. That is if you call this a credible report: … Read More
Why do I stalk the FPGA industry? Well, FPGAs are an important part of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem for two reasons: 1.) They enable very cost effective design starts which are the life’s blood of the semiconductor industry and 2.) FPGA prototyping allows designers to verify their designs before committing to silicon and… Read More
Stocks in the semiconductor equipment space continue to fall only this time along with the broad market. We had recently pointed out that LRCX was the last to fall among the large cap companies in the space but now the question becomes when have they fallen enough to say its over, and which stocks have more to fall……
ASML… Read More
At TSMC’s OIP Symposium recently, Xilinx announced that they would not be building products at the 10nm node. I say “announced” since I was hearing it for the first time, but maybe I just missed it before. Xilinx would go straight from the 16FF+ arrays that they have announced but not started shipping, and to the… Read More
I’ve lived in Silicon Valley then moved north to the Silicon Forest (aka Portland, Oregon) in 1995, and thankfully we have a lot of high-tech companies here like: Intel, Lam Research (Novellus), Lattice Semi, Qorvo, Synopsys, Mentor, Cadence, Northwest Logic, etc. There’s a global industry organization called… Read More
Recently Intel and Micron announced a new three dimensional cross point (3D Xpoint) memory. The 3D Xpoint announcement has generated a lot of questions and interest in what this new memory is and where it may fit in the semiconductor market. … Read More
Intel’s lack of exposure to handsets/China is now a positive rather than a negative
Intel’s strength in “cloud” & servers avoids much consumer weakness in China & developing Markets
Crosspoint has huge upside- Coupled with Photonics it fortifies Intel server dominance
The shoe is on the other… Read More
