Views on News
David Lammers looks at the stories behind the news shaping the semiconductor industry, including analysis, personality profiles, and quirky happenings.
Memory Takes from SEMICON West
Bob Johnson, the Gartner Inc. semiconductor manufacturing analyst, seems to enjoy putting a sharp bite on his prognostications. At SEMICON West on the opening Monday, Johnson set the stage for what turned out to be a common thread at the show, strung around the question: how will the memory chip market fare over the next few years? After telling a SEMI/Gartner market symposium that, overall, thing ...... Read More
Comments (0)New York’s Bet Pays Off
George Pataki, the former governor of New York, gave an interesting speech last week at the groundbreaking ceremony for GlobalFoundries, which is building a fab at Malta, N.Y. in upstate New York near the horse-racing mecca of Saratoga Springs. Pataki recalled a 1994 meeting with Lou Gerstner, the former IBM CEO. IBM, Gerstner said, was quietly moving employees out of New York to lower-cost states ...... Read More
Comments (1)Peering into Nanocrystal NAND
Freescale Semiconductor’s assertion that nanocrystal (NC) NOR flash will go into manufacturing next year raises the question: Can nanocrystals be employed to extend NAND flash scaling? NAND is a much bigger market than NOR now, and its potential is nearly as limitless as the data we store. However, NAND faces the same scaling and reliability challenges that NOR faces. As the polysili ...... Read More
Comments (0)Otellini and Intel’s EU Appeal
The $1.45B fine levied by the European Commission on Intel Corp. for alleged anti-competitive practices brings to mind a similarly important anti-trust case, one where the fine was never paid. In a Chicago district court in 1907, Judge Kenesaw M. Landis (later to become the commissioner of baseball) fined the Standard Oil Company $29,240,000, the maximum possible, for allegedly driving out competi ...... Read More
Comments (1)Done Deals, and Those Not Taken
Will the planned mega-merger between NEC Electronics and Renesas Technology work out? The deal creates a $13B semiconductor company a year from now, one that is about the same size as current No. 3 Texas Instruments and No. 4 Toshiba Corp. That $13B is an impressive number. But asTom Starnes, an analyst who follows the MCU market at Objective Analysis, points out, bigger is not necessarily better. ...... Read More
Comments (1)Whither Goest Sokudo?
Will Sokudo Co. Ltd. (Kyoto, Japan) continue to compete in the track business dominated by Tokyo Electron Ltd.? (Update: The company announced its twin-track Sokudo Duo system on April 21st, after this blog was first published.) Formed three years ago, on July 3, 2006, Sokudo is 52% owned by Dai Nippon Screen and 48% by Applied Materials. The two companies signed a deal to attack the track ...... Read More
Comments (0)Cheering for the Home Team
Do U.S. foundry customers care if their chips are Made In the U.S.A.? Doug Grose, CEO of the new foundry GlobalFoundries, thinks so. Asked if big fabless companies such as Qualcomm really care if their chips are made in New York or in Hsinchu, Taiwan, Grose answered, “I think they do. They are American-based companies, and they want to see the United States regain its t ...... Read More
Comments (3)The $300B Jinx
Whatever happened to the $300B semiconductor industry? Gartner Inc. analysts today (Feb. 25) issued a report worth noting, predicting that semiconductor revenues will decline between 24.1% and 33% this year. If the optimistic minus 24.1% scenario holds up, semiconductor revenues will be $194.5B this year. The veteran Gartner analyst Bryan Lewis warned, “Semiconductor supp ...... Read More
Comments (1)Considering the Options at Intel
Mark Bohr, as the Intel senior fellow in charge of pathfinding R&D at Intel’s Logic Technology Development Group (Hillsboro, Ore.), is in a job where he must balance cost concerns with technology considerations. The use of silicon carbon to create a tensile stress in the NMOS transistors is a good example. The appeal stems in part from the game-saving success of silicon germanium ...... Read More
Comments (0)IEDM and the Intel Replacement Gate Update
Already, rumors are swirling at the 2008 International Electron Device Meeting, which kicked off Sunday with two short courses here in cold and rainy San Francisco. A high-k expert said he has heard that Intel Corp. may shift its high-k/metal gate process for the 32 nm node, using a gate-first flow for the nFET and the replacement metal gate (RMG) approach for the pFET. Maintaining the work ...... Read More
Comments (0)Mark Bohr and the Drive Current Debate
It’s IEDM time, and tis the season for Intel and IBM to throw snowballs at the competition. Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr got in the spirit the other day while briefing reporters about Intel’s 32 nm technology. Bohr claimed that Intel was “more than a generation ahead of the competition.” Asked what he meant, Bohr said his assessment was not simply the two- ...... Read More
Comments (0)Luther Forest, Just in Time
As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches in the United States, people in the U.S. chip manufacturing business should make a quick bow towards Abu Dhabi and take another moment to sing a bar or two of Billy Joel’s joyful New York State of Mind. The Luther Forest fab which Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, Sunnyvale, Calif.) and the Abu Dhabi Technology Investment Co. (ATIC) plan to build near ...... Read More
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