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TSMC Tech Symposium 2026, By The Numbers


TSMC announced three new advanced process technologies at its North America Technology Symposium last week A13, A12 and N2U as part of its latest advanced technology roadmap. Compared to the roadmap presented at last year’s tech symposium, the new roadmap shows the three new process technologies in gold text. Figure 1: TSMC's Advanced Technology Roadmap. Source: TSMC To put these t... » read more

Chiplets 2026: Where Are We Today?


Jim Handy of Objective Analysis and Jawad Nasrullah from Palo Alto Electron kicked off last week's Chiplet Summit with predictions about where the chiplet market is headed and why chiplets are needed to accelerate AI. Handy noted that in the 1990s, multi-chip modules (MCMs) led to mid-'90s multi-chip packages (MCPs), and then progressed to NAND flash stacking, stacked die, big chips (e.g., X... » read more

Quantum Technologies: Innovation and Investment


Q2B25 Silicon Valley, being held this week in Santa Clara, California, is billed as "The Roadmap to Quantum Value," focusing on practical quantum technologies. This is the eighth consecutive year for the conference. Quantum computing is not typically an area that I cover, although I do have one other previous article, Leaps in Quantum Computing, that I wrote about two years ago that focused ... » read more

IBM Power Processor, This One Goes to 11


Hot Chips 25 was held August 24-26 on the Stanford University campus again this year, with many exciting and interesting presentations. I’ve noticed an overall trend with more focus being placed on overall systems rather than the socket. As the conference name suggests, there’s a history of showcasing chips, but with the increased emphasis on AI and related large-scale computing, efficiency... » read more

Is There Still a Future for Hard Disk Drives?


The capacity for solid state drives (SSDs) keeps going up while the price per terabyte keeps falling, sometimes raising questions about the future for hard disk drives (HDDs). Will the cost of SSDs per TB eventually become so low that they will totally displace HDDs? I decided to ask a couple of experts in the field, Jim Handy from Objective Analysis and Tom Coughlin of Coughlin Associates. ... » read more

TSMC Tech Symposium 2025


TSMC held its North America Technology Symposium on Wednesday, April 23, 2025 at the Santa Clara Convention Center and presented update information on its relentless march to ever finer geometries and higher levels of scaling. Figure 1, below, shows TSMC’s latest advanced technology roadmap. Compared to the roadmap presented at last year’s tech symposium, the new roadmap shows the “Hig... » read more

An Inside Look At UPF 4.0


Energy and power efficiency are increasingly important in today’s products, and the additional complexity in new architectures to incorporate competitive power management schemes has magnified the need for newer and better methodologies for the verification, implementation, and reuse of power intent specifications. This is the focus of the new IEEE 1801-2024 Unified Power Format (UPF) 4.0 ... » read more

Reducing Voltage Guard Band


The 2025 International Solid State Circuits Conference was held in San Francisco from February 16th to 20th. IBM presented three papers[1,2,3] based on their Samsung 5nm Tellum II chip. These are interesting in terms of the technology and the specifics about the design and measures taken to improve energy efficiency and reduce power. My first remembrance of a company specializing in guard-ba... » read more

Chiplets: Where Are We Today?


The 3rd annual Chiplet Summit was held in Santa Clara from January 21st to 23rd at the Convention Center. The conference continues to grow from its 1st year when it was held at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel (almost exactly 2 years ago). During his Chairman’s Welcome presentation, Chuck Sobey mentioned that there were 41 exhibitors at this year’s conference. Chuck was also the moderator f... » read more

GenAI + Semiconductors + Humanity


Silicon Catalyst held its 2024 Semiconductor Industry Forum in Mountain View, CA, at the Computer History Museum on November 13th. Richard Curtin, managing partner for Si Catalyst, opened the event by thanking David House, vice chair of the Board at the Computer History Museum and creator of the 4004 processor, and the CHM staff for hosting the event. Richard talked about the start of se... » read more

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