The simple answer is when everything in the world is smart. But if you think deeply, you would find that the continuous progression to make things easy in life is what makes the world smarter day-by-day – the sky is the limit. In the world of computing, consider the 17[SUP]th[/SUP] century era when humanbrain was used as a computer … Read More
File this one under funny things journalists are paid to say. Last week the Korea Times reported that Apple had “designated” Samsung as the primary supplier of the next Apple SoC. In response, the Chinese Commercial Times reported that TSMC is to supply the Apple A9 chip despite competition from Samsung. Since SemiWiki readers … Read More
Intel’s investor meeting was held yesterday and for me the presentation that is most interesting is Bill Holt’s. The presentations are available on the Intel website: Intel Corporation – Presentations Material 2014. Here is the 2013 version of this presentation: Intel Corporation – Presentations Materials 2013… Read More
As I wrote last week there is a whole list of companies on LinkedIn with people working on TSMC 16nm. Today TSMC released a list of customers that have risk production 16FF+ silicon. Most of us knew this already but now we can talk about it in more detail. This is a really big deal for the FinFET doubters out there. Just because Intel had… Read More
An ongoing IoT debate centers on the notion that just because we can do something does not mean we should. From discussions at the recent MEMS Executive Congress, looking at what TSMC and some others see as the endgame for a trillion sensors signals possible trouble ahead.… Read More
VLSI Technology, for those of you not of a certain age, was one of the companies that, along with LSI Logic, created the ASIC business. One challenge in ASIC is that the customer needs to decide which ASIC company to use (since the libraries and technologies are all different) meaning they needed to get quotes from several companies.… Read More
A couple of days ago I was reading a news article which said how long the world economy will be dependent on a single engine to drive it; obviously that single engine is USA. If we consider the overall economy, definitely USA is driving it, and semiconductor is a large part of it. The semiconductor is driving electronics and that is attracting… Read More
I attended Cliff Hou’s keynote at TSMC OIP Forum earlier this month. OIP is a huge undertaking. It currently has over 100 ecosystem partners, 10 technology generations, 7600+ IPs, 60+ EDA tools, 7000+ tech files and 150+ PDKs.
Most of Cliff’s presentation gave details on where TSMC are with the various processes. … Read More
I have written before about eSilicon taking their internal quoting tool and making it user accessible. This first started just for MPW shuttles for half-a-dozen foundries, and then was extended to cover production runs at TSMC. And it is getting heavily used; eSilicon have had 315 people register to use it from 43 different countries… Read More
In an SoC world driven by IP, where an SoC can have hundreds of IP (sourced not only from 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] party but also from internal business units which can have a lot of legacy) integrated together, it has become essential to have a comprehensive and standard method to verify and signoff the IP. Additionally, these checks must … Read More
