The problem I have with semiconductor analysts and media today is that they rarely have depth in what they are talking about. Some because they have never actually worked in the industry and others because they have not worked in the industry since the 1970s. One famed analyst even repeated the mythical “Fabs cost $10B” generalization… Read More
Tag: mobile
Mobile Unleashed Review
The story starts for me back in the 1980s when one of my partners told us we had to buy a machine called a BBC micro and learn how to program it. When someone asked him what can it do, apart from play space invaders, I was told as a “for example”, I could store my wife’s recipes. To view results we would have to plug the machine… Read More
TSMC OIP: What to Do With 20,000 Wafers Per Day
Today it is TSMC’s OIP Ecosystem Innovation forum. This is an annual event but is also a semi-annual update on TSMC’s processes, investment, volume ramps and more. TSMC have changed the rules for the conference this year: they have published all the presentations by their partners/customers. Tom Quan of TSMC told… Read More
Breakthrough Battery Life for Mobile Devices
Battery life is a never-ending battle for me with all of my mobile devices: Laptop, Tablet, Smart phone, bike computer, Kindle Reader, Bluetooth headset, etc. It seems like I’m constantly having to charge up my battery at the most inconvenient times. When I think about the history of batteries for mobile devices I can recall… Read More
A Complete Simulation Platform for Mobile Systems
If we take an insight into the semiconductor industry, we can easily find that mobile systems are the main drivers of this industry. The Smartphone business has remained at the top since a good number of years. Although the Smartphone sales growth has started showing a sign of stagnation, it is still a main contributor with a solid… Read More
China (and Cupertino) Are Killing Korea in Mobile
Samsung, #1 in the mobile phones based on unit shipments, has two big problems in mobile. Apple’s iPhone; and China in general and Huawei in particular in the Android world where they live. They have just announced their fifth quarter of decline. Revenue was down 8% year on year but operating profit declined 38%. They sold … Read More
Apple Took All the Money
Apple has roughly 20% market share of the smartphone unit shipments. Android has pretty much all the rest with a tiny sliver for Microsoft Windows Phone, Blackberry, and Samsung’s Tizen. By any standard, Android is the highest volume operating system ever created. Famously, Microsoft makes more money on patent licenses… Read More
Unlock the Key to Ultra-Low Power Design
We have been hearing about low power for a long time. Fortunately, low power chip operation has come about through a large number of innovations. Key among these is clock gating, frequency and voltage scaling, managing leakage with lower threshold voltage, HKMG, and many other techniques. But we are entering the age of ultra low… Read More
NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile
Since 1978 I’ve seen many trends in the semiconductor design world: transistor-level IC design, gate-level design, RTL coding, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and IP re-use. We’ve witnessed the growth in design productivity enabling chips starting with just thousands of transistor all the way up to billions of transistors… Read More
Smartphones in Q1. Sammy Back On Top
Because it is such a major impact on the semiconductor industry, being the largest and fastest growing market ever, I follow the ups and down of the mobile industry. So what happened in Q1?
Total shipments are up 2% to a record (for Q1) 440 million units but that is down 16% from Q4 which remains the biggest quarter ever.
First thing is… Read More