20 Years

By Colin Harris, Vice President, Chief Operating Officer and General Manager, Communications Business Unit, PMC-Sierra As the GSA celebrates 20 years of industry collaboration, it’s hard to believe that a handful of innovators going fabless caused such a stir in the industry. But it did. The fabless model was seen by the industry as a fundamental attack on its value chain, and without the inception of the Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) to promote the business model globally and facilitate collaboration, it would have been a lot more difficult for the new entrants to break in. We Don’t Buy from Fabless Read More

By Andy Pease, President and CEO of QuickLogic The Early Years of the Semiconductor Industry When the semiconductor industry was born approximately fifty years ago, the biggest problem it faced was how to reliably and economically manufacture large numbers of silicon-based devices.  Because this was a new industry, there was no eco-system.  This forced early device manufacturers to develop their own equipment to support the entire manufacturing chain from wafer fabrication to assembly to test.  These companies had to be vertically integrated, as they had no other choice. The limited capabilities of the early technology meant that manufacturers only could Read More

By Walden Rhines, CEO & Chairman of the Board of Directors, Mentor Graphics Twenty years ago marked the end of the first decade of tumultuous evolution for the EDA, personal computer and fabless semiconductor industries. Each had reached a level of equilibrium that promised ongoing, stable growth.  Daisy, Mentor and Valid were all founded in 1981 and by 1984 had been joined by many others including Solomon Design Associates, or SDA (1983) and ECAD (1982) which merged to form Cadence in 1988. About the same time, Synopsys was founded in 1986. Introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 triggered a Read More