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ARMv8 networking processor from HiSilicon TSMC and HiSilicon have announced the successful manufacture of the first fully functional 16nm FinFET chip.It is an ARM-based networking processor, which means it is substantially smaller than SoC or a GPU, but it is by no means a small and simple chip to produce. Twice the gate density, half the power TSMC said the new process has twice the gate density of the company’s old 28nm HPM process. It operates about 40 percent faster in the same power envelope and reduces total power consumption by 60 percent."Our FinFET R&D goes back over a...

TSMC (2330.TW), the world's largest contract chipmaker and a major supplier to Apple Inc (AAPL.O), said on Wednesday it was constructing a building that could serve as its second chip factory in Arizona in the United States. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd said in an emailed statement to Reuters that it could use the building for future expansion but has not yet arrived on a final decision for a second chip manufacturing plant. "In light of the strong customer demand we are seeing in TSMC's advanced technology, we will consider adding more capacity in Arizona with a second fab based...

The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has cut down its orders to suppliers according to reports in the Taiwanese press. TSMC, which is facing an industry slowdown as its customers struggle with demand slowdown, cut down capital expenditures for 2022 earlier this year, and the firm cited a lack of demand forecasting as the primary reason behind the drawdown. Now, the firm is also rumored to have significantly reduced its 3-nanometer output estimates for this year, in the latest bit of speculation surrounding the advanced chip manufacturing technology scheduled to enter production in the current quarter. Today's report comes courtesy...

Chinese tech giant Huawei’s attempt to make semiconductors without American equipment has generated global headlines as the US-China tech war takes yet another turn. It is one more strong hint – if any were needed – that the US government is in the process of creating a competitor that it won’t be able to control while forcing American companies to abandon a massive market that until now has supported their sales, profits, economies of scale and stock prices. Geopolitics have overridden America’s past devotion to open markets and the situation is not likely to change anytime soon as long as...

The company which is Apple’s most important chip supplier, said it expects revenue to be between $19.8 billion and $20.6 billion in the third quarter, surging from $14.8 billion in the same period last year. However, TSMC CEO CC Wei said that some of the company’s capital expenditure would be “pushed out into 2023.” He cited “greater challenges in the supply chains” which is extending delivery times for some chipmaking equipment. The strong results and outlook but caution on spending highlights the careful path chipmakers are walking at a time of concern about rising prices and the impact on consumer...

When you think about national security, you probably don’t immediately think about semiconductors. These tiny chips are the “brains” enabling all the computational capabilities and data storage that we take for granted today. Chips power virtually every sector of the economy – including data centers, automotive, healthcare, banking, and agriculture. As a consequence of their widespread use, semiconductors have grown to become a $555 billion global industry, and are the world’s fourth most traded product. Semiconductor manufacturing and advanced packaging have been cited frequently as one of the main critical supply chain priorities for the nation. A steady source of...

The day has finally come: NVIDIA IS PUBLISHING THEIR LINUX GPU KERNEL MODULES AS OPEN-SOURCE! To much excitement and a sign of the times, the embargo has just expired on this super-exciting milestone that many of us have been hoping to see for many years. Over the past two decades NVIDIA has offered great Linux driver support with their proprietary driver stack, but with the success of AMD's open-source driver effort going on for more than a decade, many have been calling for NVIDIA to open up their drivers. Their user-space software is remaining closed-source but as of today they...

Apple, Qualcomm, and Intel design chips, but when it comes to making them, the World Relies on One Chip Maker in Taiwan , Leaving Everyone Vulnerable. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSM’s chips are everywhere, though most consumers don’t know it. The company makes almost all of the world’s most sophisticated chips, and many of the simpler ones, too. They’re in billions of products with built-in electronics, including iPhones, personal computers and cars—all without any obvious sign they came from TSMC, which does the manufacturing for better-known companies that design them, like Apple Inc. and Qualcomm Inc. Its technology is so...

Score another notable win for chip giant AMD (AMD) against its heated rival Intel. AMD's market cap currently stands at $188 billion after shares rose nearly 2% in Tuesday's session. Intel's market cap is $182 billion. That marks the second time in a week AMD's market value has climbed above Intel — the first time it happened was a week ago. Followers of this battle may not be surprised to see this one happen (and seeing it continue from here) for several reasons. First, AMD has been winning the battle on Wall Street for sexier investment thesis. AMD last week...

Twelve month Facebook (a.k.a. Meta Platforms) weekly chart posted in Comment #1.

Lenovo unveiled two new laptops made out of materials including recycled aluminum and “recycled black vegan leather,” delivered in packaging made from compostable bamboo and sugarcane. But beneath the environmentally friendly hardware there’s another innovation: Microsoft’s Pluton security processor. The new Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, announced Tuesday at the International CES tech show in Las Vegas, are the first PCs to be unveiled with Pluton since Microsoft announced the security architecture in November 2020. Pluton takes security technologies that otherwise exist in a separate hardware component in Windows PCs and integrates them directly into the central processing unit. In...

An antidepressant best known as Prozac could offer the first treatment for the leading cause of blindness among people over 50, new research from the University of Virginia School of Medicine suggests. UVA's Bradley D. Gelfand, Ph.D., and collaborators have found early evidence that the drug fluoxetine may be effective against atrophic (or "dry") age-related macular degeneration, a condition that affects nearly 200 million people worldwide. The drug has shown promise in the scientists' lab tests and animal models, and the researchers bolstered by their results by examining two huge insurance databases encompassing more than 100 million Americans. That analysis...

As the world grapples with an ongoing chip shortage, a quiet giant among chipmakers has committed to investing $100 billion over three years to ramp up production. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company may not be a household name, but with a market value of over $550 billion, it’s one of the world’s 10 most valuable companies. Now, it’s leveraging its considerable resources to bring the world’s most advanced chip manufacturing back to U.S. soil. CNBC got an exclusive tour of the $12 billion fabrication plant, or fab, outside Phoenix, Arizona, where TSMC will start making 5-nanometer chips in 2024. The company...

Microsoft recently announced Windows 11 and revealed the system requirements necessary to formally install the new operating system using Windows Update, media creation tools, and update assistants. According to Microsoft's supporting documents and the spokesperson's statement, the device must have a newer processor, TPM 2.0 encryption chip, and SecureBoot enabled to fully run the operating system. Microsoft is considering reducing processor requirements for computers running Windows 11 TPM 2.0 has been included in many devices shipped in the past few years, but it is disabled by default. Users can enable TPM 2.0 in the BIOS, or bypass this restriction by...

The great computer chip shortage of 2021 will likely get worse before it gets better. This conclusion was reached following brief study and anecdotal review. Moreover, while COVID lockdowns may have initially triggered the shortage, several decades of shortsighted decisions and simmering geopolitical tensions make it much more than a matter of fixing a few broken links in the supply chain. Here’s why… The world’s top two leading chip companies are Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. These two Asian firms, combined, control more than 70 percent of the semiconductor manufacturing market. The U.S., which was once a leader,...

Intel .. on Friday broke ground on two new factories in Arizona as part of its turnaround plan to become a major manufacturer of chips for outside customers. The $20 billion plants - dubbed Fab 52 and Fab 62 - will bring the total number of Intel factories at its campus in Chandler, Arizona, to six. They will house Intel's most advanced chipmaking technology and play a central role in the Santa Clara, California-based company's effort to regain its lead in making the smallest, fastest chips by 2025, after having fallen behind rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing ... deepening its manufacturing...

This should be very concerning for tech companies that operate in the Chinese market. 'It is not clear how much pressure was put on SoftBank to form the merger, but this looks like one of the most blatant examples of IP theft that we've seen. The Chinese arm of a company has gone rogue and refused to obey the ruling of its own board. The head of that company is essentially treating it as a personal fiefdom, and Chinese authorities do not appear to have taken meaningful action to reign in Mr. Wu.'

July 26 (Reuters) - Intel Corp (INTC.O) said on Monday its factories will start building Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.O) chips and laid out a roadmap to expand its new foundry business to catch rivals such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (2330.TW) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) by 2025. Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) will be another new customer for the foundry chip business, said Intel, which for decades held the lead in technology for manufacturing the smallest, fastest computing chips. But Intel has lost that lead to TSMC and Samsung, whose manufacturing services have helped Intel's rivals Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.O)...

In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. In it, he noted [PDF] that in three years, the optimal cost per component on a chip had dropped by a factor of 10, while the optimal number had increased by the same factor, from 10 to 100. Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development – he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley – he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could...

The official announcement of Windows 11 last month brought both excitement and confusion for enthusiasts. A brand-new Windows operating system only comes around every few years, but Microsoft’s hardware requirements left many scratching their heads. Chief among them is the instance on mandatory TPM 2.0 modules and AMD Ryzen 2000 or 7th generation Intel Core (and newer) processors. The processor cutoff was particularly puzzling, considering that AMD’s first-generation Ryzen 1000 processors came out in 2017, which is not that old in the grand scheme of things. For example, the 8-core/16-thread Ryzen 7 1800X is still a perfectly acceptable processor for...