Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation is the world’s leading semiconductor foundry by revenue and, by extension, profitability. While I am deeply saddened that current CEO Morris Chang will be retiring (again) shortly, I am hopeful that his successor will be able to continue the legacy of foundry industry leadership… Read More
Success in manufacturing has two conditions: tariff barriers to shield the infant industries from external competition, and a rigorous focus on exports to ensure that manufacturing cannot just shelter behind the tariff barriers and reap monopoly profits inside the country. Each industry needs to have several companies enter,… Read More
Analog and mixed-signal ICs are tougher to design and verify compared to digital, so if you want to learn more about best practices from actual AMS engineers then consider attending a summitthat is sponsored by Cadence Design Systems next Thursday, October 10th in San Jose from 8:00AM until 6:30PM.
They’ve lined up an interesting… Read More
One of the highlights of the TSMC 2013 Open Innovation Platform® Forum was the Partner Award Ceremony. TSMC awarded Berkeley Design Automation (BDA) with the TSMC Open Innovation Platform’s Partner of the Year Award 2013 for joint development of 16nm FinFET design infrastructure. I talked with Ravi Subramanian, BDA CEO,… Read More
Global semiconductor capital spending is headed for another decline in 2013, following a 12% decline in 2012. Gartner’s September forecast called for a 7% decline in 2013. Most of the major spenders expect flat to declining expenditures in 2013. Intel in July estimated 2013 spending of $11 billion, flat with 2012 and down from … Read More
The legend of Intel being two process nodes ahead of the rest of the industry is quickly coming to an end. To come to terms with this you need to do an apple to apple comparison which is what I will do right here, right now.
First and foremost let’s compare SoC silicon delivery since SoCs are driving the semiconductor industry and will … Read More
This time it is between the suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipments. And they are among the top ranked global peers. Applied Materials Inc., holding the numero uno position in sales of chip manufacturing equipments in 2012, agreed to acquire Tokyo Electron Ltd, the third in that ranking. Gary Dickerson of Applied… Read More
With the insatiable wafer appetites of the fabless semiconductor companies in the mobile space, yield has never been more critical. The result being better EDA tools every year and this blog highlights one of the many examples. It has been a pleasure writing about Solido Design Automation and seeing them succeed amongst the foundries… Read More
The existence of TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) program further sped up disaggregation of the semiconductor supply chain. Partly, this was enabled by the existence of a healthy EDA industry and an increasingly healthy IP industry. As chip designs had grown more complex and entered the system-on-chip (SoC) era, the amount… Read More
Today TSMC announced three reference flows that they have been working on along with various EDA vendors (and ARM and perhaps other IP suppliers). The three new flows are:
