Intel announced their quarterly results today. They beat consensus by a cent. Not surprisingly their business is driven heavily by the microprocessor businesses, what Intel calls PC and Datacenter. Revenue and earnings both set new records in both groups.
As Brian Krzanich, the CEO, said:In the Data Center, we saw double-digit… Read More
Samsung’s profits fell to $3.8B which is 60% down on where they were a year ago. They said this is primarily due to a shortfall in smartphone sales. Samsung’s problem is not that it competes with Apple, their phones seem close enough that the Galaxy line has been doing very well in places like the US. It’s problem… Read More
One of the strengths of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem is competition since it keeps innovation high and prices low. One of the challenges of fostering competition is that you have to make good on a threat of using a competing product during a pricing negotiation. Well, in my opinion, for the next version of the iPhone, Apple… Read More
In the semiconductor ecosystem, several partners (or better to say stakeholders) join together in the overall value chain to finally output the most coveted chip, err I should say SoC these days. It becomes really interesting when we start analyzing the real value added by each of them, none appears to be less. Well, then to whom … Read More
It was back in April that GlobalFoundries and Samsung announced that GF would license Samsung’s 14nm process to run in their Fab8 in upstate New York. Since then there has not really been any news and of course those of us that follow the foundry industry wondered to what extent there was real substance to the agreement or if … Read More
There has been a lot of discussion on SemiWiki lately around 14nm FinFET technology and who really leads and by how much. I thought it would be interesting to review some process metrics for previous technology generation and then make some forecasts around 10nm.
The focus of this article will be Intel, TSMC and Global Foundries/Samsung… Read More
The first consumer products with 20nm processing are arriving in 2014 like the 2 billion transistor A8 chip in the iPhone 6, however at the 14nm node there are new designs underway to continue the trend of Moore’s Law. To get a better feel for the challenges of designing with 14nm FinFET technology I watched a 23 minute video … Read More
The official term is “beneficiary rule”, but among colorful racing broadcasters, drivers, and fans it is more commonly referred to as the “lucky dog”: the driver who is down a lap, but gets to advance to the lead lap by virtue of being farthest ahead when a caution flag is raised.
Qualcomm has lapped the entire field when it comes to … Read More
I found a patent recently (May,14 2013) granted to TSMC “Planar Compatible FDSOI Design Architecture”, the following sentences, directly extracted from this patent, advertise FDSOI design better than a commercial promotion! “Devices formed on SOI substrates offer many advantages over their bulk counterparts, including… Read More
Intel has begun to release some details on their 14nm process. I thought it would be interesting to contrast what Intel has disclosed to TSMC’s 16nm process disclosure from last year’s IEDM (TSMC calls their 14nm process 16nm).
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