Earlier this year semiconductor oracle Malcom Penn did his 2022 forecast which I covered here: Are We Headed for a Semiconductor Crash? The big difference with this update is the black economic clouds that are looming which may again highlight Malcolm’s forecasting prowess. I spent an hour with Malcolm and company on his Zoom cast… Read More
In my “The EUV Divide and Intel Foundry Services” article available here, I discussed the looming EUV shortage. Two days ago, Intel announced their first EUV tool installed at their new Fab 34 in Ireland is a tool they moved from Oregon. This is another indication of the scarcity of EUV tools.
I have been tracking EUV system production… Read More
At the ISS conference held from April 4th through 6th I presented on who I thought would have the leading logic technology in 2025. The following is a write up of that presentation.
ISS was a virtual conference in 2021 and I presented on who currently had logic leadership and declared TSMC the clear leader. Following that conference,… Read More
I was recently updating an analysis I did last year that looked at EUV system supply and demand, while doing this I started thinking about Intel and their Fab portfolio.
If you look at Intel’s history as a microprocessor manufacturer, they are typically ramping up their newest process node (n), in volume production… Read More
Last Thursday Intel held their investors meeting, in this write up I wanted to focus on my areas of coverage/expertise, process technology and manufacturing.
Technology Development presented by Ann Kelleher
Last year Intel presented their Intel Accelerated plan and, in this meeting, we got a review of where Intel stands on that… Read More
The global semiconductor market in 2021 was $555.9 billion, according to WSTS data released by the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). 2021 increased 26.2% from 2020, the largest annual increase since 31.8% in 2010, eleven years ago. We at Semiconductor Intelligence track publicly available semiconductor market forecasts… Read More
Kinam Kim is a longtime Samsung technologist who has published many excellent articles over the years. He is now the Chairman of Samsung Electronics, and he gave a very interesting keynote address at IEDM.
He began with some general observations:
The world is experiencing a transformation powered by semiconductors that has been… Read More
Standard Cell Scaling
Complex logic designs are built up from standard cells, in order to continue to scale logic we need to continually shrink the size of standard cells.
Figure 1 illustrates the dimensions of a standard cell.
Figure 1. Standard Cell Dimensions.
From figure 1 we can see that shrinking standard cell sizes requires… Read More
System on chip (SoC) based design has long been recognized as a powerful method to offer product differentiation through higher performance and expanded functionality. Yet, it comes with a number of limitations, such as high cost of development. Also, SoCs are monolithic, which can inhibit rapid adaptation in the face of changing… Read More
No matter how impressive the specifications are for an SoC, the power performance and area of the finished design all depend on the IP selected for the IO blocks. In particular, most SOCs designed for consumer and enterprise applications rely heavily on PCI Express. Because PCIe analog IP is critical to design success, Samsung … Read More
