Semiconductor Latest News

Number of 300mm Wafer Foundries Increases

Enormous financial and technology hurdles continue to plague the development of 450mm wafers. Ambitious goals to put 450mm wafers to use have been scaled back.  IC manufacturers are instead maximizing their manufacturing efficiency using 300mm and 200mm wafers.  IC Insights’ Global Wafer Capacity 2016-2020 report shows that

Understanding Standard Cell Characterization

Cell characterization is a process of analyzing a circuit using static and dynamic methods to generate models suitable for chip implementation flows.
 
Why is cell characterization needed?
 
No digital chip is possible without cell models. These cell models are produced by cell characterization using commercial softwares like guna.

HDL Design House Opens New Office in Thessaloniki, Greece

Belgrade, Serbia – October 4th, 2016 – HDL Design House, provider of high performance digital and analog IP cores and SoC design and verification services, is pleased to announce the official opening of its new development center in Thessaloniki, Greece, to better serve and more efficiently handle the growing number

X-FAB to Acquire Assets of Altis Semiconductor

X-FAB Silicon Foundries has today announced that it will acquire the assets of Altis Semiconductor, a specialty stand-alone foundry located in the Greater Paris area, out of insolvency proceedings.

With both companies serving complementary markets and applications, this acquisition enriches X-FAB’s offering. It roughly doubles the

Top Semiconductor Foundries Growth 2015-2016 (per process node)

IC Insights recently released its September Update to the 2016 McClean Report. This Update included Part 2 of an extensive analysis of the IC foundry business.  An excerpt from the September Update, describing foundry sales by feature size, is shown below.
 
The following 2 charts show

Is Charge Sharing Silently Killing your ASIC Design?

Sharing is caring, unless it is as vital as required charge to function your ASIC design. As we move down from 20nm and below on designs with low voltages, charge sharing is quickly becoming mission critical problem in high performance custom ASIC designs using dynamic logic. Moderate charge sharing may slow down your circuits,

Fabless Semiconductor Company Value Chain

Michael Porter developed the value chain concept in 1980 in his book “Competitive Advantage”. A value chain is a series of activities within a company in order to deliver a product or a service. The total value delivered by the company is the sum total of the value built up

Qualcomm Opens Semiconductor Test Manufacturing Site in Shanghai

Qualcomm Incorporated (NASDAQ:QCOM) today announced the opening of Qualcomm Communication Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., a semiconductor test facility in the Waigaoqiao (WGQ) free-trade zone in Shanghai, and its first foray into providing manufacturing services for semiconductors. By working with Amkor Technology, Inc., one of the world’s leading providers of contract

Verification, Validation, Testing of ASIC/SOC designs – What are the differences?

If you are involved in any ASIC/SOC design life cycle, it is highly likely that you would have heard questions like – Have you verified a feature?  Is all feature testing completed?  How will you validate a new feature?  What design defects were found and how?
 
The terminologies Verification,

Semiconductor Wafer Mask Costs

Semiconductor lithography and wafer mask set have developed dramatically in recent years. As technology migrated into nanometer geometries mask set price has increased exponentially.
 
The good news is that mask cost is decreasing every year due to maturity in production process and other factors such as market demand, competition