In an interview that Gordon Moore gave in early 2000, the former co-founder of Intel recounted how they abandoned the DRAM market in the early 1980s in order to exit the increasingly unprofitable business and focus on the promising, yet still young x86 processor market. Intel was also home to EEPROM and NOR Flash, two memory technologies… Read More
…or a global recession, but that’s not the purpose of this blog. As everybody knows, Apple is designing and selling smartphones, only. Does it mean that only smartphones are generating profit in the mobile industry? As we have seen recently in Semiwiki, Apple makes 2/3 of profit of entire mobile industry.
Let’s have a look (below)… Read More
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of AMD, I buy AMD based products whenever possible to prevent an innovation stifling Intel monopoly. Unfortunately Silicon Valley coffee house conversations continue to paint a bleak picture for AMD, even with a recent stock surge on better than expected revenue guidance for the rest of 2011. I’m… Read More
This is an amazing picture (click to enlarge). Apple now makes 2/3 of all the profit in the entire mobile handset industry. And that is the entire handset industry, not just smartphones where it has also blown past Nokia to become number one (although there are more Android handsets than iOS, those handsets are spread across multiple… Read More
Another announcement of interest, given all the discussion of Intel’s 22nm process around here, is that Samsung (along with ARM, Cadence and Synopsys) announced that they have taped out a 20nm ARM test-chip (using a Synopsys/Cadence flow).
An interesting wrinkle is that at 32nm and 28nm they used a gate-first process but… Read More
During the early 2000’s, when OEM starting to question the use of LVDS to interface with display devices, two standards has emerged: High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) and DisplayPort. HDMI has been developed by silicon Image, surfing on the success of Digital Video Interface (DVI), and was strongly supported… Read More
Intro
The 28nm nodes is ready with foundry silicon, IP and EDA tools. Tuesday morning at the DAC breakfast I learned more about the 28nm eco-system.
Notes
Why 32/28nm
–Lower power, high integration requirements, mobile applications
What is Ready?
–IP is qualified (ARM, Memories, Foundation IP, SNPS IP, PDKs)
–… Read More
The Common Platform Technology Forum last week was not well attended, less than half than the GlobalFoundries Conference. It was deja vu of previous CP forums but there were a couple of surprises to go with the disappointment. The lunch line was long, but fortunately I was escorted to the press lunch featuring VIP’s from Samsung,… Read More
Last week I talked with two experts at Mentor about the challenges of getting IC designs into the 32nm/28nm node on the Common Platform (IBM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung). Global Foundries issued a press release talking about how the four major EDA companies have worked together to qualify EDA tools for this node.
Sudhakar Jilla,… Read More
