When USB initially came out it revolutionized how peripherals connect to host systems. We all remember when Apple did away with many separate connections for mouse, keyboard, audio and more with their first computers supporting USB. USB has continued to develop more flexibility and more throughput. In 2015 Apple again introduced… Read More
Last week, TSMC held their 23rd annual technical symposium in Santa Clara. In the Fall, TSMC conducts the OIP updates from EDA/IP partners and customers. The theme of the Spring symposium is solely on TSMC’s technology development status and the future roadmap. Indirectly, the presentations also provide insight into … Read More
Memory is a big enough topic that it has its own conference, Memcon, which recently took place in October. While I was there covering the event for SemiWiki.com I went to the TSMC talk on memory technologies for the IoT market. Tom Quan, Director of the Open Innovation Platform (OIP) at TSMC was giving the talk. IoT definitely has special… Read More
I used to joke that my first car could survive a nuclear war. It was a 1971 Volvo sedan (142) that was EMP proof because it had absolutely no semiconductors in the ignition system, just points, condensers and a coil. If you go back to the Model T in 1915 you will see that the “on-board electronics” were not that different. However, today’s… Read More
Last week at TSMC’s OIP symposium, Jen-Tai Hsu, Kilopass’s VP R&D, presented A New Solution to Sensing Scheme Issues Revealed.
See also Jen-Tai Hsu Joins Kilopass and Looks to the Future of Memories
He started with giving some statistics about Kilopass:
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
DAC is a great place to gather information about products and technologies. However it can be difficult to chase down the information you need because you may need to cover a lot of ground to hear or talk to the people with the right knowledge. Fortunately there are a few places you can go to learn about a number of products at one place.… Read More
At the TSMC Technology Symposium last month Suk Lee presented a lot of information on design enablement. Suk is an interesting guy with a unique background in ASIC, Semiconductor, EDA, and now Foundry. In baseball terms that would be like playing infield, outfield, home plate, and umpire!
Around the turn of the millennium Suk actually… Read More
Doing a modern SoC design is all about assembling IP and adding a small amount of unique IC design for differentiation (plus, usually, lots of software). If you re designing in a mature process then there is not a lot of difficulty finding IP for almost anything. But if you are designing in a process that has not yet reached high-volume… Read More
With all the talk about 14/16nm and 10nm it is important to realize that older processes are still important. Eventually 16nm may end up being cheaper than 28nm but for the time being 28nm seems to be a sort of sweet spot, not just cheaper than every process that came before it (which was true for every new node) but also cheaper than every… Read More
