Frequent readers of the Semico Spin know that I am a fan of ComicCon and attend it in San Diego, CA during my family vacation. This is the seventh year in a row if I remember correctly which we attended. As I say every year, there were more geeks than you can shake [...]

Last week Semico’s Tony Massimini escaped the scorching 110° F (43°C) Phoenix temperatures and combined a work/vacation by attending ComicCon 2010 in San Diego, CA. He brought back five great video clips covering Intel and nVidia as well as his views on things to come. See all five videos at the links below. Tony, where’s [...]

There was a time when nothing was hipper than Apple—it had colors when others were grappling with grayscale,  a sense of style that was way out front, and mice when the rest of the world was stuck on “chicklet keyboards”—but gradually computing shifted. Due to wide adoption of the PCI bus family, the PC industry [...]

The weather in San Francisco was beautiful and SemiconWest was a great show this year. In addition to the many new product and technology announcements, most exhibiters are well into a healthy recovery and optimistic about the next 12-18 months.
Here are just a few of our key takeaways.
 TSV and 3D packaging were the buzzwords [...]

Fifteen years ago fabless companies flourished because production became somewhat routine and foundries could provide more than adequate manufacturing capacity. Many IDMs also realized they no longer needed to invest in internally developed, proprietary technology. Marketing and product development was the way to gain market share. After reviewing the technology announcements and presentations from DAC [...]

Solar energy is typically viewed as a very positive resource. Not only does solar energy help produce our food, recently we’ve seen a boom in photovoltaic electrical systems because we’ve gotten much better at converting sunlight into electricity.
As we all know, the solar system operates in cycles. During the past decade the sun has been [...]