An interesting deal was announced last week, another piece in the What is Next for GlobalFoundries? puzzle. IBM is sending up to 200 employees from their East Fishkill R&D facility to GF’s Malta R&D center in Saratoga County. The first thing that comes to my mind is 10nm! Considering GF is licensing Samsung 14nm, what else… Read More
Tag: tsmc
EUV Will Never Happen
I had lunch today with a guy who has to remain nameless. But he is on the edge of the semiconductor lithography thing. He told me EUV will never happen. Of course lots of people have said that. Me for one. But he said everyone knows it. The investment community, the foundries, everyone. Intel put money into ASML in the hopes that it would… Read More
Motley Fools Intel Investors Again!
It really is quite a racket. Investor bloggers spread semiconductor disinformation for $.01 per click, that coincidentally covers their stock positions, and I get paid $300 per hour to explain it to Wall Street. While I appreciate the opportunity to bond with the financial people, I do wonder how these bloggers sleep at night.… Read More
Variation-Aware Custom IC Design Best Practices
I’ve worked with Solido for 5 years, and it’s been a pleasure to watch the world’s top semiconductor companies and foundries adopt Solido software for their SPICE simulation flows.
Sub-28nm design starts are accelerating, growing from 150 in 2012 to 900 this year. The move to sub-28nm design nodes is being driven by consumer electronic… Read More
Can Intel be a Leading Semiconductor Foundry?
This is the third part of a series answering the most frequently asked questions I get from Wall Street. Please read the previous two articles on Intel’s Manufacturing Lead and Intel’s SoC Challenge before flaming me in the comment section. First let’s look at why there is a foundry business and go from there.
The big… Read More
Intel’s Manufacturing Lead Explained
The calls from Wall Street keep coming with basically the same set of questions: “Does Intel really have a 2-3 year process lead? Can Intel lead the foundry segment? Can Intel Lead the Mobile SoC Segment?” The feeling amongst the buy and sell side investment people is that unless Intel can lead a market they will not stay in it… Read More
180nm still a big deal
When I was reading the recent Daniel Payne article “Designing Change Into Semiconductor Techonomics” with commentary on a recent presentation from Aart de Geus of Synopsys, one chart jumped out at me: the most popular process node for new design starts today is 180nm.
Upon mentioning that to a few of my IoT counterparts, they quickly… Read More
FD-SOI : SMIC or…Who else?
In fact, as of today, nobody can refer to an official statement made by any STM executive about name of the foundry able to process FD-SOI wafers in 28nm. We just know that the agreement is about to (or has been) signed… But we may speculate, and try to use our rational thinking. For example, the Semiwiki readers had the opportunity to… Read More
TSMC Will Own the Internet of Things!
In my quest to uncover the future of the semiconductor industry I was quite impressed by the executive presentations at the TSMC Symposium last week. Rick Cassidy opened the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] Annual TSMC Technology Symposium followed by Dr. Mark Liu, Dr. Jack Sun, Dr. Cliff Hou, J.K Wang, Dr. V.J. Wu, and Suk Lee. A variety of topics… Read More
Dr. Morris Chang: A Conversation with the Chairman
There are moments in one’s career that are memorable beyond others, and last night was one of those moments for me, absolutely:
Stanford University President John L. Hennessy will lead a discussion with Stanford Engineering Hero Morris Chang, an innovator and entrepreneur who revolutionized the semiconductor industry by creating… Read More