If you live in California anyway, with its large Asian population, you can’t have helped noticing that it was the Lunar New Year a couple of weeks ago, the start of the year of the sheep. A couple of days after the New Year, Xilinx announced their new families of what they now call FPGAs, 3D ICs and MPSoCs. But which the rest of us … Read More
Tag: semiconductor
Semiconductor in China: Is 3rd Time a Charm?
China has recently announced extremely ambitious plans for becoming more self-sufficient in semiconductors. Today China is about 1/3 of the worldwide IC market but about 90% of that is imported. Think of something like the iPhone assembled in Shenzen with chips from TSMC, Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba/Sandisk , Micron and more (Taiwan,… Read More
Exensio: Big Data in the Fab
For 20 years PDF Solutions have been working with fabs on yield enhancement. Today, they announced their Exensio Platform for big data manufacturing environments. They haven’t really been keeping it a secret and have been talking about it at events since late last year, but it has basically been in stealth mode for the last… Read More
IP for IoT: Thanks for the Memory
The Internet of Things (IoT) is clearly the buzzword of the moment, and like many catchy phrases it also tends to mean what you want it to mean, rolling up some things that exist like the automotive market or industrial automation, along with markets for things like wearables and healthcare that are largely in the future. But however… Read More
Mentor 2014 Results
Yesterday Mentor announced their quarterly results. Since their financial year is not aligned with the calendar year, this was also the end of their fiscal 2015. The quarter was an all-time record with revenues of $439M and (non-GAAP) EPS of $1.09. The year was also an all-time record with revenues of $1.24B and EPS of $1.77. Half… Read More
Who Leads Semiconductor Innovation?
Semiconductor business is highly dependent on technology and that changes very rapidly in the semiconductor space. It’s important to recognize the importance of research and innovation activities in this space. In my last article on 7nm technology node, one respondent commented, very rightly, “It’s important to have competition… Read More
Vietnam: Rising Star in Electronics
I recently returned from a trip to Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. The trip was for pleasure, not business, but I could not help but notice the boom in economic activity. The coastal cities of Hai Phong, Da Nang and NHA Trang were trying to outdo each other in building hotels, bridges and amusement parks – largely to cater to foreign… Read More
SEMI ISS: Samsung, the Keynote That Wasn’t
At the SEMI International Strategy Symposium last month, one of the keynotes was by Jim Elliot, the CVP of Memory Marketing for Samsung. Unfortunately, due to some personal emergency, he wasn’t able to make it. But he did allow the slides of the presentation he would have given to be put up on the SEMI website. So here, for the… Read More
Open Forum for Semiconductor Professionals!
The semiconductor industry has never been more exciting than it is today, at least not in my 30 years of experience. Things are moving faster than ever before making collaboration at all levels a requirement. At SemiWiki we are afforded the privilege of passes to semiconductor conferences around the world. We also have access to… Read More
Why Would You Leave Yahoo to Go Into EDA?
I sat down this afternoon with Peter Theunis, the CTO of Methodics. Conveniently their office is about a 15 minute walk from where I live so we could chat face to face.
Peter started programming when he was 8 and his first “product” was a weather system for orchards where sensors in the orchards would send information … Read More