Category Archives: ASIC Industry Market Trends

GLOBALFOUNDRIES Release Schedule for 14nm

The 14nm technology development between Samsung and GlobalFoundries that started last year is now reaching its final step by releasing the availability schedule of the process technology including the 2 main flavors.
 

 
The primary concept of the strategic collaboration is to make 14nm FinFET technology available at

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China Jianguang to buy NXP RF Power Unit

Within the second half 2015 China Jianguang will complete the acquisition of NXP’s RF Power Unit for $1.8B. For some analysts this was a necessary strategic step as a result of the acquisition of FreeScale Semiconductor that has as well a similar unit.
 
The buyer is Jianguang Asset Management

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Mega Semiconductor Merger?

Avago Technologies , the Singaporean chipmaker that  started out as a division of Hewlett Packard (HP), is in advanced negotiations to acquire American chip manufacturer Broadcom, which makes chips for about half tablet computers and smartphones worldwide, its customers include Amazon, Apple, Google and Samsung , reported the newspaper “Wall

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Demystifying Analog & Mixed-Signal ASICs

Application Specific Integrated Circuits, ASICs, typically conjure up the notion of massively complex logic chips containing tens or hundreds of thousands (even millions) of transistors configured to solve a customer’s unique set of problems. Unlike multi-function standard product ICs such as a micro-controller that can find its way into

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Beyond RTL part 2: Domain-Specific Languages

This is the second part of my “Beyond RTL” series, where I examine alternatives to Register Transfer Level (RTL). The first part talks mostly about High-Level Synthesis, its genesis, and the state of the art of free and commercial tools that transform C/C++/SystemC to RTL. I highlighted the fundamental limitations that these

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Beyond RTL part 1: High-Level Synthesis

Let’s say for a minute that you believe that it is finally time to drop RTL (maybe it was my previous post that convinced you). What can I say? I’m glad! You now have to pick among several competing technologies, each with its pros and cons, each of course claiming to be the best,

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