Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law – part 4

Moore’s Law is dead, long live Moore’s Law – part 4
by Scotten Jones on 04-21-2015 at 11:00 pm

In the third installment of this series we discussed the status of DRAM scaling and Moore’s law. In this installment we will tackle logic. The focus will be on foundry logic.

Logic technology challenges
In the second installment of this series we discussed constant electric field scaling. As we mentioned in that installment at … Read More


Intel Inline with reduced expectations-2015 flat to down-Slashing Capex

Intel Inline with reduced expectations-2015 flat to down-Slashing Capex
by Robert Maire on 04-16-2015 at 4:00 pm

Intel Inline with lowered numbers- 2015 Revs to be Flat…
Capex Slashed by 13% to $8.7B- 10nm at risk???
Mortgaging the future???
Is the foundry business dead???
Desperately seeking growth!!!

Intel Inline…

Intel reported revenues of $12.8B and EPS of $0.41 in line with downward revised estimates after chopping $1B
Read More


Cu-Pillar in Advanced Logic Devices

Cu-Pillar in Advanced Logic Devices
by Arabinda Das on 04-10-2015 at 7:00 pm

In 2001, flipchip with solder bump was already a dominant technology and it was replacing wire bonding as the main interconnection choice for a growing number of devices. It was offering fine pitch interconnections for increased I/O counts. In the solder bump process, a bump is formed on the chip and on the package substrate and … Read More


ANSYS Enters the League of 10nm Designs with TSMC

ANSYS Enters the League of 10nm Designs with TSMC
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-09-2015 at 7:00 pm

The way we are seeing technology progression these days is unprecedented. It’s just about six months ago, I had written about the intense collaboration between ANSYSand TSMCon the 16nm FinFET based design flow and TSMC certifying ANSYS tools for TSMC 16nm FF+ technology and also conferring ANSYS with “Partner of the Year” award.… Read More


US is the Ultimate Leader in Semiconductor Business

US is the Ultimate Leader in Semiconductor Business
by Pawan Fangaria on 04-07-2015 at 6:00 pm

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


Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street

Breakfast was Fab: West Coast Wafers to Wall Street
by Paul McLellan on 04-07-2015 at 7:00 am

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?

Intel to Buy Altera?
by Paul McLellan on 03-28-2015 at 1:05 pm

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 Samsung & TSMC Love Triangle
by Robert Maire on 03-25-2015 at 10:00 am

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

TSMC 2015 Technology Symposium
by Paul McLellan on 03-25-2015 at 7:00 am


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