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.
Samsung 3nm beat TSMC to gate-all-around with its MBCFET transistor, but poor yields and thin customers meant the world's first GAA node barely mattered.
Samsung 4nm built the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, which ran so hot Qualcomm moved the refresh to TSMC, where the same chip ran cooler.…
Between 2019 and 2021, MediaTek transformed from a budget chip supplier to the largest smartphone chip vendor by volume with its Dimensity 5G line.…
Intel 7 renamed the 10nm node, Alder Lake brought Intel back, and Gelsinger's IDM 2.0 turned the company that disdained foundry work into a…
SMIC N+1 is a 7nm-class node built without EUV, after the 2020 Entity List cut SMIC off from the one machine the industry uses…
Samsung 5nm built the Snapdragon 888 and Exynos 2100, both running hot and throttling, just as TSMC's 5nm delivered Apple's cool, efficient M1.
The PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X share similar hardware, utilizing AMD components and SSDs for enhanced performance. However, they diverge in strategy: Sony…
TSMC's 5nm node put EUV across a full process for the first time and built the Apple M1, ending Intel's hold on the Mac,…
Samsung 8nm built Nvidia's RTX 30 Ampere GPUs, a marquee win taken not on the leading edge but on price and capacity while TSMC…
By early 2016, HTC, Xiaomi, and Lenovo had all quietly walked away from the same chip. MediaTek’s Helio X20 was supposed to be the…
SMIC 14nm was China's first homegrown FinFET, architected by Liang Mong Song and built for Huawei, proving SMIC could do leading-edge engineering at last.
TSMC's N7+ brought 7nm EUV into volume for the first time, ironically inside a Huawei chip, proving extreme ultraviolet in production ahead of full…
Intel 10nm arrived four years late after the 14nm purgatory, and in the delay TSMC passed Intel for good. The node where Intel lost…
TSMC's 7nm node shipped the first 7nm chip in the A12, anchored AMD's comeback against Intel, and watched GlobalFoundries quit the leading edge, leaving…
Qualcomm launches the Snapdragon XR1, the first dedicated XR chip, and the Oculus Go ships at $199 to start the standalone VR era.