I wrote last year about the challenge Arm Client/Mobile faces in growing in a saturated phone market and how they put a big focus on mobile gaming to stimulate growth. The gaming direction continues but this year they have added (of course) an AI focus, not just to mobile but also to other clients, notably PCs. It would be easy to be cynical… Read More
We are in the semiconductor market phase where everybody disagrees on what is going on. The market is up; the market is down. Mobile phones are up…. oh no, now they are down. The PC market is up—oh no, we need to wait until we can get an AI PC. The inflation is high—the consumer is not buying.
For us in the industry, the 13-week financial … Read More
I am a fan of product releases which bundle together multiple high-value advances. That approach reduces the frequency of releases (no bad thing) in exchange for more to offer per release, better proven through solid partner validation. The Dynamic Duo III release falls in this class, offering improvements in performance, capacity,… Read More
Throughout the debate on fab incentives and the Chips Act I keep seeing comments like; TSMC makes >90% of all advanced silicon, or sometimes Taiwan make >90% of all advanced silicon. This kind of ill-defined and grossly inaccurate statement drives me crazy. I just saw someone make that same claim in the SemiWiki forums and… Read More
On Wednesday, February 21st Intel held their first Foundry Direct Connect event. The event had both public and NDA sessions, and I was in both. In this article I will summarize what I learned (that is not covered by NDA) about Intel’s business, process, and wafer fab plans (my focus is process technology and wafer fabs).
For the 2024 SEMI International Strategy Symposium I was challenged by members of the organizing committee to look at where logic will be in ten years from a technology, economics, and sustainability perspective. The following is a discussion of my presentation.
To understand logic, I believe it is useful to understand what makes… Read More
At IEDM 2023, Naoto Horiguchi presented on CFETs and Middle of Line integration. I had a chance to speak with Naoto about this work and this write up is based on his presentation at IEDM and our follow up discussion. I always enjoy talking to Naoto, he is one of the leaders in logic technology development, explains the technology in … Read More
For the first time ever, IEDM held a sustainability session at the 2023 conference. I was one of the authors who presented an invited paper, the following is a summary of my presentation.
From the United Nations [1]:
“Climate Change is the defining issue of our time, and we are at a defining moment.”
“Without drastic … Read More
News suggests Intel will get 6 of first 10 High NA tools made by ASML in 2024
An industry news source, Trendforce, reports… Read More
The global semiconductor market is now solidly in a turnaround. WSTS revised its data for 2Q 2023 growth over 1Q 2023 to 6.0% from 4.2% previously. 3Q 2023 was up 6.3% from 2Q 2023. With our Semiconductor Intelligence forecast of 3% growth in 4Q 2023, the year-to-year growth in 4Q 2023 will be a positive 6%. This will set the stage for… Read More
