Category Archives: semiconductor

Macs and PCs

Posted on August 3, 2009 by paulmcl

The PC market is obviously one of the huge markets for semiconductors. I think that the semiconductor content in cell-phones (in aggregate) is now greater than in PCs but I can’t find the reference I remember. I was at Google … Continue reading →

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DAC: denial computing

Posted on July 30, 2009 by paulmcl

I went to the keynote today by nVidia’s (and Stanford’s) William Daily. The topic was the end of what he called denial architecture and the rise of throughput computing. Denial architecture was so called since it denied two things: that … Continue reading →

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What will I want in my devices?

Posted on July 1, 2009 by paulmcl

Earlier this year, Paolo Gargini gave the keynote at DesignCon. He is an Intel fellow and director of technology strategy for their manufacturing group. He discussed three market enablers that would drive innovation and new products. He wasn’t being particularly … Continue reading →

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Patents

Posted on June 24, 2009 by paulmcl

Patent law is a controversial subject and keeps popping up unexpectedly (for instance Ron Wilson writes about a case at Applied Materials here). I talked about it here in the context of CDMA and Qualcomm. The basic “tradeoff” in having … Continue reading →

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More Moore: that iSuppli report

Posted on June 22, 2009 by paulmcl

The recent iSuppli report has been getting a lot of coverage (EDN, Wall Street Journal if you have a subscription). It somewhat predicts the end of Moore’s law. If you look at the graph you can see that no process … Continue reading →

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The corporate CAD cycle

Posted on June 10, 2009 by paulmcl

Many things in business go in cycles. One in EDA is what I call the “corporate CAD cycle”. It goes like this. I’m sure a similar dynamic plays out in other industries too. A large multidivisional semiconductor company has dozens … Continue reading →

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Another look at internal development

Posted on May 28, 2009 by paulmcl

I’ve talked before about internal development, by which I mean semiconductor companies developing their own tools. I just don’t think that it is going to happen in a big way. In the early 1980s VLSI design techniques were being disseminated … Continue reading →

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Tales of CDMA

Posted on May 20, 2009 by paulmcl

It is very rare for a company to develop a new standard and establish it as part of  creating differentiation. Usually companies piggy-back their wares on existing standards and attempt to implement them better than the competition in some way. … Continue reading →

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Fab rankings

Posted on May 16, 2009 by paulmcl

The latest semiconductor rankings are out for Q1 and there are a few moves around. Intel of course remains #1 at $6.5B for the quarter, nearly twice the size of #2 Samsung at $3.6B. In turn, Samsung is almost twice … Continue reading →

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Systems: it’s turtles all the way down

Posted on April 17, 2009 by paulmcl

According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our … Continue reading →

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