Standard Cell Scaling
Complex logic designs are built up from standard cells, in order to continue to scale logic we need to continually shrink the size of standard cells.
Figure 1 illustrates the dimensions of a standard cell.
Figure 1. Standard Cell Dimensions.
From figure 1 we can see that shrinking standard cell sizes requires… Read More
Dan is joined by Dr. Wally Rhines. Dan discusses the recent announcement that Wally is the newest recipient of the Dr. Morris Chang Exemplary Leadership Award. The meaning of the award and some history of Morris Chang and TSMC are discussed. The recent funding round for Cornami, led by SoftBank, is also discussed. What is Cornami… Read More
TSMC recently held their Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum event where many of their key partners presented on their latest projects and developments. This year one of their top IP provider partners, Analog Bits, gave two presentations. Analog building blocks have always been necessary as enabling technology … Read More
“Super” Moore’s Law- 5 nodes in 4 years- Too good to be true?
Gelsinger said “Intel will be advantaged with High NA EUV”
Ponte Vecchio better with “TSMC Inside”
Global Flounders IPO as price drops on public debut
Lets do the time warp again….(apologies to Riff Raff)
Its just … Read More
Semiconductor capital expenditures (CapEx) are on track for strong growth in 2021. For many companies the increase should continue into 2022. TSMC, the dominant foundry company, expects to spend $30 billion in CapEx in 2021, a 74% increase from 2020. TSMC announced in March it plans to invest $100 billion over the next three years,… Read More
The Apple event today was essentially a reveal of the latest and greatest silicon coming out of the Apple/TSMC partnership and how far ahead of everything else it is. The Mac was simply an aluminum container for the new silicon.
More importantly the event and specs of the TWO new chips, the M1 Pro and the M1 Max demonstrate that the M1… Read More
Anyone who has read my previous articles about IEDM knows I consider it the premier conference on process technology.
Last year due to COVID IEDM was virtual and although virtual offers some advantages the hallway conversations that can be such an important part of the conference are lost. This year IEDM is returning as a live event… Read More
The arrival of fall seems to typically raise the number of conferences hosted by semiconductor ecosystem companies. The conferences may go by different names. But whether called a forum, summit, conference, or by some other creative name, the purpose is the same. It is to bring together technologists and business people together… Read More
Back in May of 2020 I published some comparisons of the cost to run a TSMC fab in Arizona versus their fabs in Taiwan. I found the fab operating cost based on the country-to-country difference to only be 3.4% higher in the US and then I found an additional 3.8% because of the smaller fab scale. Since that time, I have continued to encounter… Read More
– If chips are “as good as it gets” so are the stock prices
– Are we at a near term ceiling that stocks have bounced off of?
– If growth slows do valuations also slow?
– Are we in a holding pattern waiting for a down cycle?
Second order derivative investing
As we have said many times in the past, investors… Read More
