Semicon West 2019 – Day 4 – Soitec

Semicon West 2019 – Day 4 – Soitec
by Scotten Jones on 08-21-2019 at 6:00 am

Last year at Semicon I sat down with Soitec and got an update on the company. You can read my write up from last year here. A key point last year was Soitec was continuing to be profitable and grow after several years of financial struggles.

On Thursday, July 11th I got to sit down with Soitec’s CEO, Paul Boudre and get an update on… Read More


Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear

Tensilica HiFi DSPs for What I Want to Hear, and What I Don’t Want to Hear
by Randy Smith on 08-16-2019 at 10:00 am

It seems every day we see a new article (or ten) on autonomous driving. It is an especially hot topic, and it will happen someday. For now, we can dream about it, and many people are working on it. But for the present, the technology in a car that commands my attention is audio. I’ve been a musician since 4th grade. I still perform occasionally… Read More


Silvaco Talks Atoms to Systems – Where to Next?

Silvaco Talks Atoms to Systems – Where to Next?
by Randy Smith on 07-17-2019 at 10:00 am

At the ES Design West event in San Francisco last week Silvaco’s CTO and EVP of Products, Babak Taheri, gave a presentation titled, “Next Generation SoC Design: From Atoms to Systems”. The time slot for the talk was only 30-minutes which is simply not enough to discuss all the technology Silvaco is providing now. I had not looked closely… Read More


Micron beats subdued guidance on output cuts

Micron beats subdued guidance on output cuts
by Robert Maire on 06-26-2019 at 5:00 am

2020 capex likely down at least 20% vs 2019 DRAM & NAND price drops versus slowing capacity. Investors happy cause it could have been worse.

Micron reported $1.05 in Non-GAAP EPS beating street consensus of $0.79 by $0.26. While this looks like a big beat, we would remind investors that estimates for the quarter were about… Read More


Silvaco Samsung and Excitement at 56thDAC

Silvaco Samsung and Excitement at 56thDAC
by Daniel Nenni on 05-25-2019 at 8:00 am

There were quite a few announcements at the Samsung Foundry Forum but my favorite was the IP partnership between Samsung and Silvaco. IP is a critical part of the fabless ecosystem and one of the advantages an IDM foundry has over a pure-play is the vast amounts of internal IP that have been silicon proven over the years. With Samsung… Read More


TSMC and Samsung 5nm Comparison

TSMC and Samsung 5nm Comparison
by Scotten Jones on 05-03-2019 at 7:00 am

Samsung and TSMC have both made recent disclosures about their 5nm process and I though it would be a good time to look at what we know about them and compare the two processes.

A lot of what has been announced about 5nm is in comparison to 7nm so we will first review 7nm.

7nm
Figure 1 compares Samsung’s 7LPP process to TSMC’s 7FF and 7FFP… Read More


TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 DRAM and Emerging Memories

TechInsights Gives Memory Update at IEDM18 DRAM and Emerging Memories
by BHD on 04-17-2019 at 12:00 pm

On the Sunday evening at IEDM last year, TechInsights held a reception in which Arabinda Das and Jeongdong Choe gave presentations that attracted a roomful of conference attendees.

This is the second part of the review of Jeongdong’s talk, we covered NAND flash technology in the last post. Jeongdong is a Senior Technical… Read More


Samsung 5nm and TSMC 6nm Update

Samsung 5nm and TSMC 6nm Update
by Daniel Nenni on 04-16-2019 at 12:00 pm

TSMC and Samsung continue to raise the competitive bar for FinFET foundry market share with dueling announcements this week. As I mentioned previously in the blog Semiconductor Foundry Landscape Update 2019, FinFETs are the market to watch with the coming onslaught of 5G and AI chips on the edge, in the cloud, and in our autonomous… Read More


What to Expect from the GSA Executive European Forum?

What to Expect from the GSA Executive European Forum?
by Eric Esteve on 04-02-2019 at 7:00 am

I plan to attend to the GSA European Forum in Munich (April 15-16), so I first looked at the event description and at the impressive speakers list. In such event, the goal is at 50% to listen, and 50% to network with the speakers and the other attendant. The center of gravity is clearly semiconductor, but the event involved speakers … Read More


SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference 2019 Overall Impressions

SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference 2019 Overall Impressions
by Scotten Jones on 03-05-2019 at 6:00 am

Last week I attended the 2019 SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference. I gave two presentations, attended dozens of papers and conducted three interviews. I will be doing some detailed write ups particularly on EUV but I am waiting for the presentations from several of the papers. In the mean time I thought I would put some overall … Read More