From several literatures, talks in the semiconductor industry, forecasts, and BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), specifically in the context of IoT (Internet of Things) and IoE (Internet of Everything), we have been looking forward to a world with over a trillion sensors around us. I recollect (produced below) from an impressive… Read More
Tag: semiconductor
US is the Ultimate Leader in Semiconductor Business
Last year in November when I looked at the world’s top20 semiconductor companies with Samsungand TSMCbeing at the second and third rank respectively, first being Intel, I computed the sales numbers of the companies based on their countries and found that Taiwan and South Korea accounted for 34.5% of the total sales of the top20 … Read More
Semiconductor CAPEX Growth Increases Fab Equipment Spending!
SEMI Forecasts 15% Increase in Fab Equipment Spending for 2015
With worldwide capex growth of 8%, fab equipment spending is expected to increase by 15% in 2015, according to the most recent edition of the SEMI (www.semi.org) World Fab Forecast. SEMI’s data also predicts a slowdown of fab equipment spending in 2016 to low single … Read More
Life Without EUV: SPIE Day 2
I previously published a summary of day 1 of SPIE and I wanted to follow up with observations from successive days.
SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, was founded in 1955 to advance light-based technologies.Serving more than 256,000 constituents from approximately 155 countries, the not-for-profit … Read More
The Earth is Not Flat; Neither is IP
Chip design is largely about assembling pre-designed IP, either developed in other groups in the same company, or brought in from a 3rd party, or occasionally developed within the SoC design group itself. But that makes it sound like it is a bunch of blocks linked together with some interconnect, but of course another important … Read More
Intel to Buy Altera?
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
Medicals Marriage with Semis
I remember a couple of decades ago, my father used to go to a nearby doctor’s clinic to get his blood pressure and sugar levels checked. I guess, in around 1990s small electronic kits became available to measure these usual daily health indicators and instantly display the numbers. I bought a few for my father then. Today, the scene… Read More
25 Years of SNUG; 50 Years of Moore’s Law
Earlier this week it was the Synopsys user group meeting SNUG. Not just any old SNUG but the 25th Annual SNUG. The first one was 15th March 1991 and was attended by 100 people. At the time, Synopsys had annual revenues of $22M. This year, the various SNUGs around the world will have a total attendance of 10,000 people and Synopsys revenue… Read More
SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA
If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked… Read More
SoCs More Vulnerable to ESD at Lower Nodes
Electro Static Discharge (ESD) has been a major cause of failures in electronic devices. As the electronic devices have moved towards high density SoCs accommodating ever increasing number of gates at lower process nodes, their vulnerability to ESD effects has only increased. Among the reasons for ESD failures in SoCs, device… Read More