18 months ago Renesas announced they were prototyping their SG-MONOS eFlash on 28nm, and at the time we said it would be a couple of years before actual product. Yesterday, Renesas revealed their partner in this effort is TSMC – no surprise – and hinted things are moving, with better performance than expected but on a longer qualification… Read More
Tag: tsmc
Flex Logix validating EFLX on TSMC 40ULP
Flex Logix has been heads-down for the last several months working toward customer implementations of their EFLX reconfigurable RTL IP cores. Today, they’ve announced a family of 10 hard IP cores ready in TSMC 40ULP, and provided an update to their roadmap for us.… Read More
MediaTek is on the Move with TSMC!
MediaTek (MTK) recently made the news for announcing their first leading edge SoC (Helio X30), a 32% increase in quarter over quarter sales, and an expected 30% increase for the year. Both of which deserve a closer look as we move into the second half of 2016 which should be very strong for MTK TSMC, and the fabless semiconductor ecosystem.… Read More
What is Inside the iPhone 7?
TSMC is the bellwether for not only the foundry business, since they are the dominant player, but also the semiconductor industry as a whole. You could also argue that TSMC is a sneak peek into the world economy since they build capacity based on their customer’s forecasts and the world now revolves around semiconductors.
The other… Read More
TSMC and Pokemon Go!
As Pokemon Go invades the world, let me give you a firsthand player’s description of the game and why the next generation of augmented reality apps will energize the fabless semiconductor ecosystem and greatly benefit TSMC.
While I am not a “gamer” per say, I am a technologist and am always looking for new semiconductor market drivers.… Read More
Xilinx is Killing Altera!
At a recent outing with FPGA friends from days gone by, the long running Xilinx vs Altera debate has come to an end. The bottom line is that Xilinx has used the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) of the Intel acquisition quite effectively against Altera and is racking up 20nm and 16nm design wins at an alarming rate. It will be a while … Read More
ARM vs Intel: The New War Frontiers
With Intel’s exit from smartphone processor market, the competitive zones are redefined with its rivalry with ARM. Is ARM’s domination the only reason for Intel’s exit? With no competing architecture, is ARM a monopoly in smartphone processor IP market? What are the new areas of competition between ARM and Intel? I will attempt… Read More
Is the Intel Cash Cow in Danger?
There was an interesting panel at the Silicon Summit sponsored by the Global Semiconductor Alliance (GSA) on “Designing for the Cloud.” It was led by Linley Gwennap (The Linley Group) with Ivo Bolsons (Xilinx), Ian Ferguson (ARM), and Steve Pawloski (Micron). Missing of course was Intel which derives close to 30% of its revenue… Read More
Electrostatic Discharge analysis of FinFET technology
Sofics recently had the opportunity to characterize FinFET technology through cooperation with one of its customers. We analyzed the technology related to ESD and identified several challenges.… Read More
TSMC Update at #53DAC!
TSMC is having an interesting year for sure. I was at the TSMC Symposium in Hsinchu last week and everyone was talking about the new 16FFC process. Silicon is out and it is exceeding expectations leading some people (me included) to believe that TSMC 16FFC will be the next TSMC 28nm in regards to popularity. To be clear, 16FFC is currently… Read More