Siliconica

When Intel launched their Haswell series chips last June, they stated that the high-end systems would have embedded DRAM, as a separate chip in the package; and they gave a paper at the VLSI Technology Symposium [1] that month, and another at IEDM [2]. It took us a while to track down a couple of laptops with the requisite Haswell version, but we did and now we have a few…

Next week, the researchers and practitioners of the electron device world will be gathering in Washington D.C. for the 2013 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting.  To quote the conference web front page, “IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and…

Next week, the researchers and practitioners of the electron device world will be gathering in Washington D.C. for the 2013 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting.  To quote the conference web front page, “IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and…

Next week, the researchers and practitioners of the electron device world will be gathering in Washington D.C. for the 2013 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting.  To quote the conference web front page, “IEDM is the flagship conference for nanometer-scale CMOS transistor technology, advanced memory, displays, sensors, MEMS devices, novel quantum and nano-scale devices and phenomenology, optoelectronics, devices for power and energy harvesting, high-speed devices, as well as process technology and…

I normally don’t have the time to follow local press, but occasionally Google Alerts pops up with something quite interesting. In this case, the Albany Times Union from Albany, New York had an intriguing headline that supports some of the gossip around Apple’s fabrication plans for their A-series processor chips, up to now fabbed by Samsung. At least in the short term, and from a technology point of view, this…

I normally don’t have the time to follow local press, but occasionally Google Alerts pops up with something quite interesting. In this case, the Albany Times Union from Albany, New York had an intriguing headline that supports some of the gossip around Apple’s fabrication plans for their A-series processor chips, up to now fabbed by Samsung. At least in the short term, and from a technology point of view, this…

Last week, we started tearing down the Apple iPhone 5S. There has been much speculation that Apple would be moving their processor chips over to TSMC, but I think that we can now decisively say that this has not occurred – they have migrated to 28nm, but still at Samsung. Earlier in the day last Friday we established from the look of the die that the A7 was manufactured by…

Last week, we started tearing down the Apple iPhone 5S. There has been much speculation that Apple would be moving their processor chips over to TSMC, but I think that we can now decisively say that this has not occurred – they have migrated to 28nm, but still at Samsung. Earlier in the day last Friday we established from the look of the die that the A7 was manufactured by…

Last week, we started tearing down the Apple iPhone 5S. There has been much speculation that Apple would be moving their processor chips over to TSMC, but I think that we can now decisively say that this has not occurred – they have migrated to 28nm, but still at Samsung. Earlier in the day last Friday we established from the look of the die that the A7 was manufactured by…

The Snapdragon 800 (Qualcomm MSM8974) is Qualcomm’s leading-edge, low-power, mobile phone app’s processor with built-in 3G/4G LTE modem, using the latest Krait 400 CPU rated at 2.3 GHz and their 450 MHz Adreno 330 GPU. It was launched at this year’s CES International with this rather slick commercial. Significantly, it is fabricated using the TSMC 28HPM (28-nm, High-Performance Mobile) process, which extends TSMC’s high-k, metal gate (HKMG) processing into the mobile space.…