If the thought of a silicon respin keeps you awake at night, you’re not alone. Re-fabricating a chip can cost tens of millions of dollars. An unplanned respin also risks a delay in getting a product to market, which adds tremendous costs in terms of lost business.
Undoubtedly, adding to your sleep loss is the recent rise in respins.… Read More
If we look at the semiconductor industry expansion during the last 25 years, adoption of design IP in every application appears to be one of the major factors of success, with silicon technology incredible development by a x100 factor, from 250nm in 2018 to 3nm (if not 2nm) in 2023. We foresee the move to chiplet-based architecture… Read More
– The new M1 chip unveils previously hidden asset
– Could/should Apple sell semiconductors?
– Are servers next?
– The M1 chip appears to be a rousing success and the beginning of a new era
Essentially 100% of all early reports on the performance of the M1 chip have come back with stellar reviews. Great performance… Read More
TSMC is the bellwether for not just the semiconductor industry but the worldwide economy. TSMC makes semiconductors, semiconductors are where electronics begin and electronics are the foundation of modern life, absolutely.
Apple is also a key economic indicator and as we all know Apple is a strategic partner of TSMC. The Apple… Read More
While Alchip is speeding its way down the TSMC process technology roadmap I am reminded how important services are to the semiconductor ecosystem. We can thank ASIC companies like Alchip for the heavy investment systems companies have made into semiconductors. We covered this in our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor… Read More
TSMC has had an incredible run since its founding in 1987 which spans most of my 36 year semiconductor career. Even in these troubled times TSMC is a shining bellwether with double digit growth expectations while the semiconductor industry will be flat or slightly down. Let’s take a close look at the TSMC Q1 2020 conference call and… Read More
Technological leadership has long been key to TSMC’s success and they are following up their leadership development of 5nm with the world’s smallest SRAM cell at 0.021um 2 with circuit design details of their write assist techniques necessary to achieve the full potential of this revolutionary technology. In addition to their… Read More
Back in April, 2019, TSMC announced that they were introducing their 5 nm technology in risk production and now at IEDM 2019 they brought forth a detailed description of the process which has passed 1000 hour HTOL and will be in high volume production in 1H 2020. This 5nm technology is a full node scaling from 7nm using smart scaling… Read More
After returning from a week in Southern China I found the TSMC Q4 2019 conference call even more interesting. In China they are preparing for the New Year’s Celebration so everything is very festive but what struck me hardest was the massive investment in infrastructure and security. Semiconductors are of course a big part… Read More
Samsung is warming up and spending again
Samsung gave its preliminary report for Q4 and it was well better than prior muted expectations. It doesn’t take long for Samsung’s business units to respond to business trends in either direction and we have already heard of increased spending plans on the part of Samsung.… Read More
