The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Chipmakers Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has purchased a brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. LLNL will receive a 16-chip TrueNorth system from IBM. A single TrueNorth processor from IBM consists of 5.4 billion transistors wired together to create an array of 1 million digital neurons. The chip is fabricated based on a 28nm LPP pro... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Qualcomm recently announced the new Snapdragon 820. The cell-phone chipset is based on Samsung Electronics’ new 14nm LPP (Low-Power Plus) process, the second-generation of the company’s 14nm finFET process technology. What’s next? Qualcomm is developing the Snapdragon 830. “Snapdragon 830 leaks indicate that the chip will sport 8GB of RAM, an enhanced Kryo custom architecture, and fabbe... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing


Don't look now, but the fab tool market is slowing. "After recent meetings in the supply chain plus examining comments from the largest spenders, we conclude that wafer fab equipment (WFE) could disappoint this year. We calculate approximately $30 billion to $31 billion in WFE spending in 2014, flattish from 2013, compared to expectations of $32 billion to $33 billion, which would be up 10%+. T... » read more

The Week In Review: Manufacturing And Design


Blocking cell phone use and texting while driving have been proposed by the U.S. government and for good reason. About 10 people a day are killed in “distraction-affected” car accidents in the U.S., according to the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. As a result, some companies are developing technologies that can block texts while driving. But according to Strategy Analyt... » read more

Big Changes Rock Global Smartphone Market


It's not just consumers that are benefiting from the proliferation of low-cost mobile multiple-core processors. Chipmakers are reaping the benefits of the booming smartphone market in Asia and around the globe. In the multicore smartphone applications processor market Qualcomm. leads the way with its Snapdragon processors; it accounted for 43% of the market in the first half of this year, fo... » read more

The Week In Review: Oct. 18


By Mark LaPedus & Ed Sperling The problems continue with extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography. ASML promised to deliver an 80 Watt power source by year’s end. Now, the company said it only will have a 70 Watt source by mid-2014. “We are focusing on reaching the 70 Watts by the middle of next year,” said Peter Wennink, ASML’s CEO, in a conference call to discuss the company’s res... » read more

The Week In Review: Sept. 3


By Mark LaPedus The cellular chip supplier landscape is littered with corpses. So will 4G lead to the destruction of Qualcomm and Intel? That’s highly unlikely, according to a blog from Strategy Analytics. “With the recent announcement of a multimode LTE chipset from Intel, it seems likely that Qualcomm and Intel will maintain their status as the top two cellular radio chipset suppliers in... » read more

New Foundry Gold Rush: RF SOI


By Mark LaPedus About every five years or so, a new and hot market emerges in the specialty foundry business that resembles a frenetic gold rush. The last big gold rush occurred around 2008, when more than a dozen foundries jumped into the bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) market to capitalize on the booming power-management sector. Now, the next gold rush is centering on an emerging technology—th... » read more

CMOS And SOI Invade RF Front End


By Mark LaPedus The next-generation 4G wireless standard known as long-term evolution (LTE) presents some new and difficult design choices for OEMs. One of the more difficult choices involves the less glamorous, but arguably the most critical part in a handset—the radio-frequency (RF) front-end. Typically, the RF front-end often comes in a module and includes various key components, such ... » read more

Smartphones Dial Up New RF Processes


By Mark LaPedus The rapid shift towards smartphones and tablets is driving the need for new and low-power chips at finer geometries. Today, the latest application processors, integrated basebands and other digital cell-phone chips are 28nm planar devices. And it won’t be long before OEMs incorporate 20nm planar and finFET devices in their systems as a means to reduce power and extend batt... » read more

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