Don Brooks is well known to many long time semiconductor insiders, like myself, but most SemiWiki readers have probably never heard of him. Don is a semiconductor legend and here is his story. This will be in two parts since he had a big impact on the semiconductor industry and TSMC. From 1991 to 1997 Don served as President of TSMC and… Read More
Most people ( including ChatGPT) think Morris Chang was the first TSMC CEO but it was in fact Jim Dykes, a very interesting character in the semiconductor industry.
According to his eulogy: Jim came from the humblest of beginnings, easily sharing that he grew up in a house without running water and never had a bed of his own. But because… Read More
TSMC and Philips have deep historical ties. In fact, TSMC may not have existed without Philips. In the 1980s TSMC was established as a joint venture with Philips Electronics, the government of Taiwan, and other private investors. Several semiconductor companies were approached by Morris Chang for funding including semiconductor… Read More
High volume manufacturing is a 24/7 business with 12 hour shifts. You don’t always get to pick the shifts you want and you must cover for others when they can’t. It’s a challenging career and not for the faint of heart like myself.
In the 1980s and 1990s I spent time in Japan working with some of the top Japanese semiconductor manufacturers.… Read More
Now that semiconductors are front page news and a political football, I would like to write more about how we got to where we are today to better understand where semiconductors will go tomorrow. I will start this article with a provocative quote that really made me laugh and will put some context to what I am trying to accomplish here:… Read More
Harry Peterson is a mixed-signal chip designer with a BS in Physics from Caltech. He managed IC design groups within Fairchild, Kodak, Philips, Northern Telecom, Toshiba and Pixelworks. During sabbaticals he helped fly experiments on NASA’s orbiting satellite observatory (OSO-8) and build telescopes in the Canary… Read More
-SEMICON well attended but bouncing along the biz bottom
-Recovery seems at least a year away with memory even more
-AI creates hope but not impactful- Disconnect tween stocks & reality
-AMAT me too platform- Back end benefits from chiplets
SEMICON is certainly back to pre-covid levels or perhaps better.… Read More
Intel held a webinar today to discuss their IDM2.0 internal foundry model. On the call were Dave Zinsner Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer and Jason Grebe Corporate Vice President and General Manager of the Corporate Planning Group.
On a humorous note, the person moderating the attendee questions sounded … Read More
Last week TSMC announced the opening of an advanced backend fab for the expansion of the TSMC 3DFabric System Integration Technology. It’s a significant announcement as the chip packaging arms race with Intel and Samsung is heating up.
Fab 6 is TSMC’s first all-in-one advanced packaging and testing fab which is part of the… Read More
At the 2023 VLSI Symposium on Technology and Circuits, Intel presented two papers on their PowerVia technology. We received a pre-conference briefing on the technology embargoed until the conference began and received the papers.
Traditionally all interconnects have taken place on the front side of devices with signal and … Read More
