SPIE is the premier event for lithography held in Silicon Valley and again Scotten Jones and I will be attending. EUV is generally the star of the show and this year will be no different now that TSMC has committed to EUV production in 2019.
Last year at SPIE, TSMC presented the history of EUV development from the beginning in 1985 as … Read More
Things just got interesting in the iPhone supply chain with the $1B AAPL Vs QCOM legal action filed this week. For the life of me I could not understand why Apple second sourced the normally QCOM modem in the iPhone 7. It caused quite a stir in the technical community but we could only surmise that it was a price issue on the business side.… Read More
When I first saw emerging semiconductor IP company Flex Logix actively involved with TSMC I knew something big was coming and boy was I right. DARPA announced today that an agreement is in place with Flex Logix to develop EFLX eFPGA technology on TSMC 16FFC for use by companies or Government agencies designing chips for the US Government.… Read More
As I mentioned in my previous post, the TSMC investor call this month was very interesting and Morris Chang was in fine form during the Q&A. As a semiconductor professional I think some of the questions are ridiculous but maybe they have value to the financial people. This one question from Randy, who I think is very astute, is … Read More
I caught up with John Ferguson of Mentor Graphics this week to learn more about a recent announcement that TSMC has extended its collaboration with Mentor in the area of Fan-Out Wafer Level Processing (FOWLP).
In March of last year Mentor and TSMC announced that they were collaborating on a design and verification flow for TSMC’s… Read More
As a long time semiconductor IP professional I can tell you for a fact that it is one of the most challenging segments of semiconductor design. Given the growing criticality of semiconductor IP, the challenges of being a leading edge IP provider are increasing and may be at a breaking point. The question now is: What does it take to … Read More
In early September of 2016 I published an article “The 2016 Leading Edge Semiconductor Landscape” that proved to be very popular with many views, comments and reposting’s. Since I wrote that article a lot of new data has become available enabling some projections to be replaced by actual values and new analysis… Read More
In the first session of IEDM on Monday, December 5th there were two papers presented on 7nm processes. The first paper was from TSMC and the second paper was from the Global Alliance of GLOBALFOUNDRIES, IBM and Samsung.… Read More
The cost trend for leading edge semiconductor technologies is a subject of some controversy in the industry. Cost is a complex issue with many interacting factors and much of the information out in the industry is in my opinion misleading or incorrect. In this article, I will discuss each of the factors as well as present a view of … Read More
Lam & Applied talked about “sustainable” growth Both expect share gains & growth in a flattish market. We examine the “new, lower, cyclicality”. Although Applied and Lam are fierce competitors , coming at things from different directions, they sounded awfully similar last week.
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