In a consolidating semiconductor business environment and innovation in semiconductor fabrication already scaling new heights with existing strong players, where do you think the wafer capacity should concentrate? It’s pure-play foundries or pure-play-like foundries, and those who supply high-volume common components… Read More
Tag: tsmc
FinFET will finally arrive for GPU’s in 2016
It used to be that GPU chips moved to new process nodes pretty frequently, previously as often as annually. That is up until 2011. That was the year that 28nm GPU’s were unveiled. Since then there has been a long pause. Now in the wake of the 2016 CES both Nvidia, with its previously announced Pascal, and AMD, with the just announced Polaris,… Read More
China’s chip plans an economic attack on Taiwan?
An economic “bear hug” cold war invasion? If China can’t get Taiwan by politics or force maybe it can get them by a backdoor economic takeover starting at their most crucial spot – Chips. An ulterior motive for China’s semiconductor aspirations, the $100B silicon Trojan Horse?
Its quite clear … Read More
Calibre in the Middle of Semiconductor Ecosystem
Albert Einsteinhad said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity”. In today’s world dominated by technology, or I must say internet which has initiated collaborative information sharing, “leading from the middle” is the new mantra of life.… Read More
Semiconductor capital spending consolidating
Shipments of semiconductor wafer fab equipment are expected to grow 2.5% in 2016 after 0.5% growth in 2015 according to the December forecast from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI). Gartner is more pessimistic, with its October forecast calling for fab equipment to decline 0.5% in 2015 and drop 2.5%… Read More
The Twists and Turns of Xilinx vs Altera!
The battle between Xilinx and Altera continues to be one of the more interesting stories to cover. It really is the semiconductor version of a reality TV show. In the beginning it was two fabless companies partnered with rival foundries going head-to-head controlling a single market that touches a variety of industries.
Then things… Read More
When Talking About IoT, Don’t Forget Memory
Memory is a big enough topic that it has its own conference, Memcon, which recently took place in October. While I was there covering the event for SemiWiki.com I went to the TSMC talk on memory technologies for the IoT market. Tom Quan, Director of the Open Innovation Platform (OIP) at TSMC was giving the talk. IoT definitely has special… Read More
IP-SoC Rebound in 2015 !
Going to IP-SoC every year since 2006, I have enjoyed the conference as it’s the only one 100% IP focused and a very good opportunity to network within this rather small ecosystem of IP vendors… but I must admit that, since 2012, the attendance tend to be lower than before. Because of the well-known “chicken & egg” theorem, low … Read More
GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 1 – It’s All About Execution
Fabless companies and the need for foundries
The success of fabless semiconductor companies is well documented with companies such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, MediaTek, AMD, Avago and others selling semiconductors made using the fabless model (see Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry by Daniel Nenni and … Read More
Are FinFETs too Expensive for Mainstream Chips?
One of the most common things I hear now is that the majority of the fabless semiconductor business will stay at 28nm due to the high cost of FinFETs. I wholeheartedly disagree, mainly because I have been hearing that for many years and it has yet to be proven true. The same was said about 40nm since 28nm HKMG was more expensive, which … Read More