Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More
Tag: intel
What Makes Us Indecisive?
An indecision is actually a very bad decision. It is an implicit decision for the status quo. It is worse than an explicit decision regardless of how bad that decision turns out to be. In my experience, our indecisiveness is caused by various reasons involving trade-offs.… Read More
Moore’s Law and Silicon Forest
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
My View of Contextual Leadership
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
Eliminating the Chasm of Computing
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
Who Will Get the Next Bite of Apple Chip Business?
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
Xilinx Beats Altera to the First FinFET FPGA!
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
EUV – So late to the party it may already be over!
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
Xilinx Skips 10nm
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
The Future of Moore’s Law
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