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
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
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
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
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 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
The design community is always hungry for high-performance, low-power, and low-cost devices. There is emergence of FinFET and FDSOI technologies at ultra-low process nodes to provide high-performance and low-power requirements at lower die-size. However, these advanced process nodes are prone to new sources of variation.… Read More
About 13 months ago, the leak blogs posted news of “Artemis” on an alleged ARM roadmap slide, supposedly a new 16FF ARM core positioned as the presumptive successor to the Cortex-A57. Now, we’re finding out what “Artemis” may actually be, inside a multi-core PPA test chip on TSMC 10FinFET.… Read More
Continuing to find new ways to extend Moore’s Law, the foundry and technology leader is ready to show off its wafer level system integration prowess with two scalable platforms targeting key growth markets.
CoWoS® (Chip-On-Wafer-On-Substrate) goes after high-performance applications, providing the highest bandwidth and… Read More
If you plan on visiting Solido (the world leader in EDA software for variation-aware design of integrated circuits) at the Design Automation Conference next month for a demonstration of Variation Designer, register online now and get an autographed copy of “Mobile Unleashed”. Such a deal!
Solido Variation Designer is used by… Read More
