Intel made a big splash on March 23, 2021 by doubling down on manufacturing with the creation of Intel Foundry Services (IFS). The big announcement was supported by potential customers such as Qualcomm, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. With an accompanying $20B investment, the EDA and equipment industries,… Read More
In January I presented at the ISS conference a comparison of Intel’s, Samsung’s and TSMC’s leading edge offerings. You can read a write-up of my presentation here.
With the problems going on at Intel, that article generated a lot of interest in the investment community, and I have been holding a lot of calls with analysts who are trying… Read More
New Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is not wasting any time in changing the course of the largest semiconductor company the world has ever seen. Today he announced the IDM 2.0 strategy which will better leverage Intel’s manufacturing abilities. There is a lot to talk about here but let’s focus on the new Intel Foundry Services because the… Read More
The term von Neumann bottleneck is used to denote the issue with the efficiency of the architecture that separates computational resources from data memory. The transfer of data from memory to the CPU contributes substantially to the latency, and dissipates a significant percentage of the overall energy associated with … Read More
At the SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference held in February, ASML presented the latest information on their Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) and Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) exposure systems. I recently got to interview Mike Lercel of ASML to discuss the presentations.
DUV
Despite all the attention EUV is getting, most layers are still… Read More
Research pursuing in-memory computing architectures is extremely active. At the recent International Solid State Circuits conference (ISSCC 2021), multiple technical sessions were dedicated to novel memory array technologies to support the computational demand of machine learning algorithms.
The inefficiencies associated… Read More
“What are the tradeoffs when designing a register file?” Engineering graduates pursuing a career in microelectronics might expect to be asked this question during a job interview. (I was.)
On the surface, one might reply, “Well, a register file is just like any other memory array – address inputs, data inputs and outputs, read/write… Read More
There are reports in the media that TSMC is now planning six Fabs in Arizona (the image above is Fab 18 in Taiwan). The original post I saw referred to a Megafab and claimed six fabs with 100,000 wafers per month of capacity (wpm) for $35 billion dollars. The report further claimed it would be larger than TSMC fabs in Taiwan.
This report… Read More
– Semiconductor shortage is like toilet paper shortage in early Covid
– Panic buying, hoarding, double ordering will cause spike
– Could cause a year+ of dislocation in chip makers before ending
– Investors, Govt & Mgmt will get a wake up call from earnings hit
Auto industry is just a prominent tip … Read More
– Semi Situation Stems from long term systemic neglect
– Will require much more than money & time than thought
– Fundamental change is needed to offset the financial bias
– Auto industry is just the hint of a much larger problem
Like recognizing global warming when the water is up to your neck
The problem… Read More
