I spent the day at the SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium in Half Moon Bay. The early part of the day was devoted to technology challenges. Obviously everyone did not say exactly the same things, and had a little bit of a different spin depending on what business they are in. But there was a lot of commonality between Intel, IBM, Xilinx… Read More
Tag: semiconductor
GSA Silicon Summit
Every year the GSA holds the GSA Silicon Summit. This year it is on April 10th at the Computer History Museum. It runs from 9am until 2.15pm. This year the focus is mostly on technologies other than simply scaling semiconductor technology. The meeting is divided into 3 sessions, each of which starts with a presentation and then is … Read More
International CES: Day Four
Wednesday, January 8.
Sensors are big at CES. Big as in many vendors and applications, but small in size. Sensors were prominent features in automobiles, PCs, tablets and mobile phones. But the most exciting is the relatively new area of digital health and fitness. CES has 366 exhibitors in this category, with most of them featuring… Read More
FD-SOI Memories
When people discuss capabilities of leading edge process nodes they tend to focus on digital logic. Microprocessors in particular. But a process requires more than just digital logic and standard cells to be successful. In particular, pretty much every SoC contains a lot of memory so the memory capabilities of a process are important.… Read More
A Brief History of Andes Technology
I like to call Andes Technology the biggest microprocessor IP company you’ve never heard of. I wrote about themback in October when I sat down with them during the Linley Microprocessor Conference. Part of the reason you have never heard of them is that they are based in Taiwan and most of their business is in Taiwan and China.… Read More
GlobalFoundries Has a New CEO
Sanjay Jha is taking over as CEO of GlobalFoundries. His background is in mobile. He was at Qualcomm in the early part of his career and was COO from 2006 to 2008 before going to be co-CEO of Motorola and then, when the company was split, CEO of Motorola Mobility. That was acquired by Google and he stepped down after the acquisition closed.… Read More
Imagination’s New GPU Cores
This morning Imagination announced their latest GPU cores, including the world’s smallest fully-featured OpenGL ES3.0/OpenCL GPU core. More on that below. And it is the Internet…and graphics…so cats. Graphically rendered cats.
The first core is a a high end core new generation PowerVR Series6XT architecture… Read More
Structured Asic Dies…Again
There has always been a dream that you could do a design in a cheap easy to design technology and then, if the design was a hit, press a button and instantly move it into a cheaper unit-price high volume design. When I was at VLSI in the 1980s we had approaches to make it easy to move gate arrays (relatively large die area) into standard cells… Read More
New Frontiers in Scan Diagnosis
As we move down into more and more advanced process nodes, the rules of how we test designs are having to change. One big challenge is the requirement to zoom in and fix problems by doing root cause analysis on test data alone, along with the rest of the design data such as detailed layout, optical proximity correction and so on. But without… Read More
SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium
The SEMI Industry Strategy Symposium (ISS) is Jan 13th-15th at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay. When I discussed this with my beautiful wife as a possible business trip for us and mentioned the agenda she stopped me and said, “You had me at Ritz-Carlton!” As you can see by the picture it has a beautiful ocean view and includes a world… Read More