Last year in November when I looked at the world’s top20 semiconductor companies with Samsungand TSMCbeing at the second and third rank respectively, first being Intel, I computed the sales numbers of the companies based on their countries and found that Taiwan and South Korea accounted for 34.5% of the total sales of the top20 … Read More
Tag: samsung
Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street
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 Pebble Reinitiated the Inning for Smartwatch
The effort for adding phone function into watch had started much earlier in 1999 when several tech companies joined the crusade to enter the big watch market. Notable among them were Samsung, IBM, Microsoft, Fossiland Sony Ericsson. The effort lasted for about a decade before showing its signs of fatigue. Microsoft SPOT (Smart… Read More
What is Inside of the Samsung Galaxy S6?
I’ve always been curious about what is inside an electronic device, and it was seeing the very first TI handheld calculator that got me started into a career as an Electrical Engineer. Next to Apple, the most popular brand in smart phone devices these days has got to be Samsung and they have just launched the Galaxy S6 device.… Read More
Passage of Time with Watches
During my childhood in my native place in India, although there were good watches around from Seiko, Citizen and some of the Indian companies, I used to see some old men and women never using any watch but still being fairly accurate in perceiving time by just watching the position of sun, or moon, or the shadow formed by a certain object.… Read More
The Apple A9 Samsung & TSMC Love Triangle
The Apple A9 drama continues to play out with no certainty!
At the end of the day does it matter?
Will the winner be the loser?
A Comedy, Tragedy or Love Story?
Depends on your view…
Act I Scene I…The stage is set….
We are watching an Italian Opera of a standard love triangle….
The object of desire is the rich … Read More
TSMC ♥ UMC?
The relationship between TSMC and UMC is one of the more interesting ones in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem in my opinion. Both are headquartered in Hsinchu Taiwan and it is very hard to visit one company without seeing the other as they have facilities right across the street from each other. They also share humble beginnings… Read More
FD-SOI Foundry
At the end of last month during ISSCC there was a forum organized by the SOI Consortium. It took place in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel (which, if you have never been there, is famous for converting its old entryway for carriages into an amazing dining room, and for a bar with a huge painting by Maxfield Parrish of the Pied Piper valued… Read More
Apple Leaks Chip Sources?
Take a look at the figure below and tell me this information did not come from inside Apple. The question is: Was it voluntary or involuntary? Inquiring minds want to know! There are some minor surprises which I will get to in a minute but the actual source information is spot on to what I have heard the past few quarters. This spicy little… Read More
FinFET Design Enablement
We read about FinFET technology in the semiconductor press daily now, thanks to Intel introducing their TriGate transistors starting in 2011 and creating a race with foundries and IDMs to switch from planar CMOS nodes. To get some perspective about the progress of FinFET IP and EDA tools I spoke with two experts from Synopsys, Swami… Read More