The TSMC quarterly conference call was last week and of course it stirred up quite a bit of controversy. Let me share with you my experience, observations, and opinions and maybe together we can come up with an accurate prediction for 2016. First let’s take a look at 20nm and what people now call the “Apple effect.”
Correct… Read More
Today the deal for GlobalFoundries to acquire IBM’s semiconductor division closed, having had regulatory clearance from Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States a couple of days ago. GlobalFoundries is, of course, owned by Mubadala which is owned by the government of the Abu Dhabi, and I have heard that there… Read More
Global real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2015 is expected to be 3.5%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) April 2015 report. 2015 is a slight acceleration of 0.1 percentage points from 3.4% growth in 2014. The IMF projects 2016 global growth of 3.8%, an acceleration of 0.3 percentage points from 2015. The… Read More
One announcement that I missed coming up to the Design Automation Conference last week was that SiCAD is hosting a portfolio of IBM’s design automation tools in the cloud. Supposedly these are priced half the cost of similar capability from Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor. So should the big three be worried? Is this an earth-shattering… Read More
Somebody said to me recently that SEMICON West, which takes place in San Francisco July 14-16th, isn’t that big a deal since very little manufacturing goes on in the US any more. In fact 15% of manufacturing capacity is in north america (I think that actually means the US since I don’t think there are any fabs in Canada).… Read More
As we have moved down from a CAGR of ~9% over last three decades to a CAGR of ~5% in the current decade, it’s time to check the realities. It can be definitely argued that a 5% of CAGR over a solid base of ~$378 billion should be considered good enough. In my view that’s the sign of maturity in the semiconductor market. At the same time we are… Read More
Synopsys had their earnings announcement and call last week. They were good. In Aart’s own words:I’m happy to report that our second quarter results were very strong and solidify our outlook for the full year. We delivered revenue of $557 million, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.68 and $155 million in operation cash flow.… Read More
One task that is not very exciting but is critical is that of library quality assurance. Many design groups have created their own procedures, often having been burned in the past, to ensure that the libraries that they use are good. Failure to do so has resulted in:… Read More
Huge designs, spectacular design costs, astronomical capital expenditure. Welcome to the present day semiconductor industry. As discussed in my prior post, the days of democratized silicon access have been replaced by an elite market. Custom chips are once again a rich person’s game. Does it have to stay this way? I personally… Read More
It’s less than four weeks to go at DAC 2015 and the program is final now. So I started investigating new technologies, trends, methodologies, and tools that will be unveiled and discussed in this DAC. In the hindsight of the semiconductor industry over the last year, I see 14nm technologies in the realization stage and 10nm beckoning… Read More
