In an overwhelmingly digital world, there is a constant cry about the analog design process being slow, not automated, going at its own pace in the same old fashion, and so on. And, the analog world is not happy with the way it’s getting dragged into imperfect automation so it can be more like the digital world. True, the analog world… Read More
At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More
Electronics is unusually an evergreen industry where companies make profit, yet end-product prices go down significantly after a brief period of price skimming. A product phases out quite fast (in case of smartphones every 1.5 to 2 years), but still yields big bucks for successful companies in its value-chain. How does this happen?… Read More
Intel’s 10nm may be reliving the 14nm elongated delay issue-
Schedules & tool delivery may be pushed even deeper into 2016-
Meanwhile Samsung & TSMC press on-
Could Intel be embarrassed?
… Read More
Earlier this week at DAC, Javier DeLaCruz of eSilicon presented at the Samsung booth. They presented an introduction to what eSilicon does. However, since what they do has changed over the years it is useful to recap. If you know about eSilicon then you probably think of them as a fabless ASIC company. The old ASIC model back in the … Read More
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
The Apple and Samsung relationship is an interesting one. On one hand they have co-developed some of the most innovative products on the market today (iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch) yet they are fierce competitors in the mobile market. Some call this type of business relationship “frenemies” others refer to the old Italian proverb… Read More
Last week I talked to Marco Brambilla of Synapse Design. Synapse is a design services company headquartered in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2003 by Satish Bagalkotkar and has been profitable since the beginning. Today it has over 700 people. In addition to the headquarters in Santa Clara, they have a software group in Colorado,… Read More
The Advance Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference was held on May 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] through May 6[SUP]th[/SUP] in Saratoga Springs, New York. ASMC brings a unique operational perspective to technical conferences related to semiconductors. In this blog I wanted to discuss what I thought was the most interesting paper of the… Read More
When we talk about analog IC market, one can easily guess who the leader with lion’s share in the market is. There are also next level leaders with impressive growth rates in this market. The analog market as such is poised to grow with Internet of Things (IoT) because it supplies some of the key components such as data converters, op… Read More
