Eliminating the Chasm of Computing

Eliminating the Chasm of Computing
by Pawan Fangaria on 10-25-2015 at 7:00 am

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


Samsung to cut Semi Capex 20% due to over capacity

Samsung to cut Semi Capex 20% due to over capacity
by Robert Maire on 09-24-2015 at 4:00 pm

Article confirms market fears…
An article in the Korea Times cites sources that say Samsung will cut Semi Capex by 20% due to current oversupply and weak pricing. This is obviously a huge negative as Capex for 2016 will certainly be down significantly from 2015 given these cuts which follow on cuts by Intel and others. We can
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Intel – "Inside" good markets, outside bad- Huge potential in Memory & Photonics

Intel – "Inside" good markets, outside bad- Huge potential in Memory & Photonics
by Robert Maire on 09-11-2015 at 2:00 am

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 otherRead More


SEMICON Day 1: IoT Everywhere…and China

SEMICON Day 1: IoT Everywhere…and China
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2015 at 5:00 pm

The first day of SEMICON West for me is usually imec day. They have a full day of presentations. But I saw the most interesting ones in Brussels recently so I decided to go to the SEMI/Gartner day instead. They run in parallel ballrooms in the Marriot on 4th street.

To me there were two big themes. One was the unavoidable internet of things… Read More


Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street

Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street
by Paul McLellan on 04-07-2015 at 7:00 am

SEMI describes themselves as “the global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the micro- and nano-electronics industries.” That is a pretty broad remit. One of the things that they do as a neutral party is produce the World Fab Forecast. This is actually a bottom-up database that tracks fabs as they … Read More


How Well is HSPICE Tracking Current Design Trends?

How Well is HSPICE Tracking Current Design Trends?
by Tom Simon on 02-11-2015 at 10:00 pm

For about 5 years now Synopsys has held an HSPICE SIG event in conjunction with DesignCon. It features a small vendor faire with companies that partner with Synopsys on HSPICE flows. They also have a dinner with industry/customer speakers and provide an update on HSPICE development. Lastly there is a Q&A where customers get… Read More


Samsung Continues to Top 300mm Wafer Capacity

Samsung Continues to Top 300mm Wafer Capacity
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-03-2015 at 7:00 am

In 1992, when Samsungbecame the largest producer of memory chips, it was not in top10 list of semiconductor companies. It was ranked at #11. Since then it has strived to attain higher ranks in the top10 list. In around 2000, it climbed to the ranks of top5 and then since 2002 until now it is at #2 in the worldwide semiconductor sales which… Read More


Mark Adams Keynote at #semiconwest

Mark Adams Keynote at #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-09-2014 at 12:58 pm

The first surprise of the opening keynote for Semicon West was on the slides that were cycling on the screen as the room filled up. Somehow our book Fabless had managed to be in the rotation.

The opening keynote was by Mark Adams, the President of Micron. He was talking about upcoming big changes in the semiconductor environment, although… Read More


Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron

Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron
by Daniel Payne on 05-08-2014 at 12:50 pm

IDM companies like Micronuse SPICE circuit simulators during the design phase in order to predict timing, currents and power on their custom IC chip designs at the transistor level. A senior memory design engineer at Micron named Raed Sabbahtalked today at a webinarabout how the embedded solutions group uses the FineSimcircuit… Read More