The industry everything else quietly runs on. I cover it from the fab up, process nodes and lithography and the foundry wars, plus the export controls now deciding who even gets to build what. This is the manufacturing and geopolitics side of silicon, kept deliberately apart from the chip-and-platform coverage.
TSMC's 28nm node brought gate-last high-k metal gate just as every mobile chip designer arrived at once, triggering a capacity crunch, while Intel's Tri-Gate…
Qualcomm's acquisition of Atheros for $3.1 billion expands its control over smartphone components, combining cellular and short-range radios. With the upcoming custom Krait CPU…
SMIC 45nm was the company's most current node yet, reached two years behind the leaders, the year after SMIC turned its first profit since…
Qualcomm's Snapdragon S2, featuring the Adreno 205 GPU, delivers impressive mid-range performance, enhancing gaming smoothness. Its effective graphics capabilities support over 120 device designs,…
Samsung 45nm silicon built the Apple A4, Apple's first in-house chip, on the same Intrinsity Hummingbird core Samsung put in the Galaxy S, even…
Intel 32nm arrived on schedule with second-generation high-k metal gate and Intel's first immersion lithography, extending a two-year lead while the company quietly ceded…
SMIC 65nm arrived in November 2009, the week TSMC won its trade-secret case, took a stake of up to 10 percent, and founder Richard…
TSMC's 40nm node turned immersion lithography into a yield crisis in 2009, choked AMD and Nvidia GPU supply, drew Morris Chang back as CEO,…
Intel 45nm shipped the first high-k metal gate transistor in volume, hafnium dielectric and metal gates built gate-last on dry 193nm litho, solving gate…
Toulouse builds deep semiconductor talent and robotics research layers that power later IoT and physical AI breakthroughs.
SMIC 90nm put the Shanghai foundry two nodes behind the leaders and closing, climbing alone on imported tools and hired talent while the settled…