Last year in November when I looked at the world’s top20 semiconductor companies with Samsungand TSMCbeing at the second and third rank respectively, first being Intel, I computed the sales numbers of the companies based on their countries and found that Taiwan and South Korea accounted for 34.5% of the total sales of the top20 … Read More
Tag: tsmc
Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street
SEMI describes themselves as “the global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the micro- and nano-electronics industries.” That is a pretty broad remit. One of the things that they do as a neutral party is produce the World Fab Forecast. This is actually a bottom-up database that tracks fabs as they … Read More
Intel to Buy Altera?
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
The Apple A9 Samsung & TSMC Love Triangle
The Apple A9 drama continues to play out with no certainty!
At the end of the day does it matter?
Will the winner be the loser?
A Comedy, Tragedy or Love Story?
Depends on your view…
Act I Scene I…The stage is set….
We are watching an Italian Opera of a standard love triangle….
The object of desire is the rich … Read More
TSMC 2015 Technology Symposium
This year’s North American TSMC Technology Symposium is fast approaching. There are three, starting in Silicon Valley.
- San Jose on Tuesday April 7th at the San Jose Convention Center
- Boston on Tuesday April 14th at the Burlington Marriott
- Austin on Thursday April 16th at the downtown Hilton
The symposium will also take … Read More
Silvaco Swallows Invarian
Yesterday, Silvaco announced that it has acquired Invarian Inc. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.
Who is Invarian? They are a recognized leader in block-level to full-chip sign-off analysis for complex, high-performance ICs. Their unique methodology utilizes a parallel architecture and concurrent power-voltage-thermal… Read More
TSMC ♥ UMC?
The relationship between TSMC and UMC is one of the more interesting ones in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem in my opinion. Both are headquartered in Hsinchu Taiwan and it is very hard to visit one company without seeing the other as they have facilities right across the street from each other. They also share humble beginnings… Read More
Apple Leaks Chip Sources?
Take a look at the figure below and tell me this information did not come from inside Apple. The question is: Was it voluntary or involuntary? Inquiring minds want to know! There are some minor surprises which I will get to in a minute but the actual source information is spot on to what I have heard the past few quarters. This spicy little… Read More
SoCs More Vulnerable to ESD at Lower Nodes
Electro Static Discharge (ESD) has been a major cause of failures in electronic devices. As the electronic devices have moved towards high density SoCs accommodating ever increasing number of gates at lower process nodes, their vulnerability to ESD effects has only increased. Among the reasons for ESD failures in SoCs, device… Read More
FinFET Design Enablement
We read about FinFET technology in the semiconductor press daily now, thanks to Intel introducing their TriGate transistors starting in 2011 and creating a race with foundries and IDMs to switch from planar CMOS nodes. To get some perspective about the progress of FinFET IP and EDA tools I spoke with two experts from Synopsys, Swami… Read More