Last year at Semicon I sat down with Soitec and got an update on the company. You can read my write up from last year here. A key point last year was Soitec was continuing to be profitable and grow after several years of financial struggles.
On Thursday, July 11th I got to sit down with Soitec’s CEO, Paul Boudre and get an update on… Read More
Recently I published two blogs on Fully Depleted Silicon On Insulator (FDSOI) and the potential the technology shows for a variety of low power and wireless applications. In order to produce FDSOI devices, the device layer has to be thin enough to ensure the device is fully depleted and ideally the buried oxide has to be thin enough… Read More
Interesting news last week with 51.9% of British voters saying yes to Brexit (exiting the European Union). What does it have to do with semiconductors? Plenty! After reading the media’s take on the subject and talking to friends (experts) in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, I must say that there is not a consensus to be found and there… Read More
One of the main criticisms of the FDSOI technology has been that it is a one-node solution at best and is not scalable to the future. Such arguments are typically based on the “gate-length-scaling” assumptions which do not capture the past and current trends of the CMOS technology as I discussed in my earlier post. Back in the early… Read More
…and FinFET down to 3nm. This assertion is the result of extensive research work made by Thomas Skotnicki, ST Fellow and Technical VP, Disruptive Technologies, leading to numerous publications, like in 1988 in IEEE EDL or in 2008 in IEEE TED paper. I say extensive, I should also say long, very long, as it took almost 30 years for the… Read More
During 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC, there was a special session where a brand new Apple watch was opened and each of its components was shown with a brief description about it. I found this tear down session a great innovative idea coming from DAC organizers; actually two buzzing products, AppleWatch and DJI’s Phantom Drone were opened… Read More
The LETI days and the associated FD-SOI workshop took place in Grenoble (France) last week and I could not attend in person… but I had the opportunity to speak with LETI CEO Marie Semaria. Before going into details into the 3 key messages from the LETI (FD-SOI, Silicon Impulse and Cool Cube), it’s important to share the great news from… Read More
It appears so. Why there is so much rush towards FD-SOI in recent days? Before talking about the game, let me reflect a bit on the FD-SOI technology first. The FD-SOI at 28nm claims to be the most power-efficient and lesser cost technology compared to any other technology available at that node. There are many other advantages from… Read More
What does system on chip (SoC) actually mean? How this tech moniker came into being? There is quite a bit of enigma about SoC in the technology press and what this term really stands for. Roger Shepherd, consultant at Parallel Computer Systems, shares on Quora his version of the SoC story. He says that he first heard about SoCs when … Read More
4K UHD TVs were all dressed up at CES 2014 with no content to show. The good news for the 2014 holiday season is the industry has converged on one set of standards for display, interfacing, and encoding, so consumers should not be left marooned in an instant replay of the 3DTV hype-crash cycle. It may be a bit longer before everyone can… Read More
