LSI Corporationstarted in 1980s and I had several encounters with it during my jobs in 1990s; not to forget the LSI chips I used to see in desktops and other electronic systems, and I’m happy to see LSI continuing today with more vigour having leadership position in storage and networking space. It provides highly reliable, high … Read More
One of the most important and underrated tasks in a semiconductor company is creating the cost model. This is needed in order to be able to price products, and is especially acute in an ASIC or foundry business where there is no sense of a market price because the customer and not the manufacturer owns the intellectual property and … Read More
Every industry has famous thought leaders that can summarize where we’ve been and then paint a picture of where we’re headed towards in the future. Often they make statements that become industry expressions, like “Moore’s Law” or the “Internet of Things”. I think that if Synopsys… Read More
I think by now a lot has been said about the necessity of multi-patterning at advanced technology nodes with extremely low feature size such as 20nm, because lithography using 193nm wavelength of light makes printing and manufacturing of semiconductor design very difficult. The multi-patterning is a novel semiconductor manufacturing… Read More
Since I started looking at the ways Texas Instrumentsworks through its strategies, my belief is getting firmed up that this is one company which can always sail through rough waters during downturn and reap rich benefits during upturn. They regularly review their strategies and can predict ahead of time when the water is about … Read More
Spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is headed for healthy growth in 2014. The latest data from SEMI and the Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ) shows March 2014 three-month-average billings for semiconductor manufacturing equipment were up 16% from February 2014 and up 31% from a year ago. Bookings… Read More
This was one of the most memorable keynotes I have seen, absolutely. Probably because it supports my belief that the infamous Intel slide that “projected” Intel will continue a linear manufacturing cost per transistor improvement at 14nm and 10nm is pure marketing fluff. Even more interesting, according to Intel, other semiconductor… Read More
To further my quest to comprehend the latest trends in the semiconductor industry continues, I spent the morning with SEMI at the “The Silicon Valley Breakfast Forum: Internet of Things (IoT) – Driving the Microelectronics Revolution” seminar. I’m a big fan of the breakfast seminar concept. I’m up early anyway and it is … Read More
As Moore’s law started saturating on a single semiconductor die, the semiconductor community came up with the approach of growing vertically by stacking dies one above other in a 3D-IC arrangement. However, a major concern with a 3D-IC is that the heat generated by each die can get trapped in the stack, and hence it’s extremely important… Read More
I’m at the GSA Silicon Summit today, at the computer history museum. The first panel session this morning was about future process technology. It was moderated by Joe Sawicki of Mentor with a panel consisting of Rob Aitken from ARM, Paul Farrar of G450C, Peter Huang of TSMC, John Kibarian of PDF Solutions and someone from Applied… Read More
