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> First, cell phones ate EVERYTHING. So, the only volume is in cell phones. Not sure where your getting this. The MCU market dwarfs the cellular market, last t

by mbell 11y ago

> First, cell phones ate EVERYTHING. So, the only volume is in cell phones. Not sure where your getting this. The MCU market dwarfs the cellular market, last time I looked it was on the order of 25B MCUs sold per year and the majority are still 8bit MCU. There are only ~1B cell phones produced per year. I don't think the discrete market is really all that driven by cell phones.

bsder 11y ago
The problem with you argument is that 8-bit MCU's are a rounding error. The Cortex A series cores are around 2mmx2mm. The Cortex M series are something like .2mmx.2mm. It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off. So, let's assume that the 8-bit MCU's are .1mmx.1mm. That's probably WAY too big, but let's start somewhere. That means that you can fit 7,000,000 on a wafer. For roughly 3,500 wafers for the entire, worldwide capacity of embedded MCU's. The entire, worldwide, annual market for MCU's is 3,500 silicon wafers per year. That's the same number of wafer starts that a big fab has IN A WEEK. And that was 2008. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357 Modern fabs can pump out a million a week: electroiq.com/blog/2014/01/tsmc-samsung-and-micron-top-list-of-ic-industry-capacity-leaders/ This is why everybody wants to produce bigger chips like SOC's and why Intel will never switch to ARM until it's about to go under. If your chip is too small, you can't move enough to fill your fab even if you give them away free.
- msravi 11y ago
  > It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off. Not by too much. A mobile baseband SoC that supports 2G+3G+LTE-Cat-6 will end up in the 7mmx7mm range with a 28nm process.
- jdc 11y ago
  Why would Intel switch to ARM?
  - bsder 11y ago
    They won't. But it's a standard refrain that Intel should produce ARM chips.
- nascentmind 11y ago
  What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    >IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else You have to distinguish between the wearables/smart home stuff and industrial IoT that has a real impact on cost saving and efficiency. Much of the former is idiotic. The latter is a huge market even if a lot of the details are still being worked out.
  - bsder 11y ago
    > I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. Moore's Law slowing down is good for firmware people. Optimizing, by hand, for 10% matters when you can't just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18 months. > I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else. The embedded space is power and cost constrained. Power constrained because of batteries and their inability to deal with RF. Cost constrained because memory now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost. IoT is a lot of hype. The problem is that IoT is LOW VOLUME, and nobody wants to deal with that. So, everybody wants you to adopt their "highly scalable" (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real work who are creating and marketing the application device. And, everybody decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is in the backend so they refuse to play along. The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be the one who stumbles into the high volume application. Think Qualcomm getting started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.
- mbell 11y ago
  I'm not really sure how this pertains to On/Fairchild. On produces a few MCUs but as far as I know it's not a significant part of their business. My point was that there are massively more applications that require supporting electronics, which is what these two companies specialize in, than there are cell phones built. I also don't think your size numbers are realistic. You're not building Cortex A57's on the same process as Microchip is building PIC18s. Completely different size scales and completely different fabrication lines. It's not like Fairchild/On could just 'pick up' a contract to build SoCs on the lines they use to build PWM motor controllers.

by mbell 11y ago

bsder 11y ago

The problem with you argument is that 8-bit MCU's are a rounding error. The Cortex A series cores are around 2mmx2mm. The Cortex M series are something like .2mmx.2mm. It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off. So, let's assume that the 8-bit MCU's are .1mmx.1mm. That's probably WAY too big, but let's start somewhere. That means that you can fit 7,000,000 on a wafer. For roughly 3,500 wafers for the entire, worldwide capacity of embedded MCU's. The entire, worldwide, annual market for MCU's is 3,500 silicon wafers per year. That's the same number of wafer starts that a big fab has IN A WEEK. And that was 2008. http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1169357 Modern fabs can pump out a million a week: electroiq.com/blog/2014/01/tsmc-samsung-and-micron-top-list-of-ic-industry-capacity-leaders/ This is why everybody wants to produce bigger chips like SOC's and why Intel will never switch to ARM until it's about to go under. If your chip is too small, you can't move enough to fill your fab even if you give them away free.

msravi 11y ago
> It looks like my 10mmx10mm comment was way off. Not by too much. A mobile baseband SoC that supports 2G+3G+LTE-Cat-6 will end up in the 7mmx7mm range with a 28nm process.
jdc 11y ago
Why would Intel switch to ARM?
- bsder 11y ago
  They won't. But it's a standard refrain that Intel should produce ARM chips.
nascentmind 11y ago
What will be the impact of this on jobs? I see a lot of layoffs in the semiconductor industry. I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else.
- ghaff 11y ago
  >IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else You have to distinguish between the wearables/smart home stuff and industrial IoT that has a real impact on cost saving and efficiency. Much of the former is idiotic. The latter is a huge market even if a lot of the details are still being worked out.
- bsder 11y ago
  > I don't know what is the impact on jobs for a firmware engineer. Moore's Law slowing down is good for firmware people. Optimizing, by hand, for 10% matters when you can't just get a factor of 2 automatically every 18 months. > I don't see anything new coming soon in the embedded space and IoT looks like more of a hype than anything else. The embedded space is power and cost constrained. Power constrained because of batteries and their inability to deal with RF. Cost constrained because memory now makes up 75% plus of chip area which defines the cost. IoT is a lot of hype. The problem is that IoT is LOW VOLUME, and nobody wants to deal with that. So, everybody wants you to adopt their "highly scalable" (har har) backend and extract rent from the people doing the real work who are creating and marketing the application device. And, everybody decent at producing devices is also smart enough to realize that the money is in the backend so they refuse to play along. The company that is willing to slog through the swamp of low volume will be the one who stumbles into the high volume application. Think Qualcomm getting started by tracking trucks and stumbling into cellular phones.
mbell 11y ago
I'm not really sure how this pertains to On/Fairchild. On produces a few MCUs but as far as I know it's not a significant part of their business. My point was that there are massively more applications that require supporting electronics, which is what these two companies specialize in, than there are cell phones built. I also don't think your size numbers are realistic. You're not building Cortex A57's on the same process as Microchip is building PIC18s. Completely different size scales and completely different fabrication lines. It's not like Fairchild/On could just 'pick up' a contract to build SoCs on the lines they use to build PWM motor controllers.