Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry and How I Wrote the Book

Tomorrow it is CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley. If you are attending, I will be there giving away copies of Cadence's latest book, which I wrote along with Frank Schirrmeister, with editing by Tanushri Shah. For details of the book, see my recentish post New Book: Hyperscale Computing Trends 2022.

The plan is that Frank and I should be around to sign them too. So come to the reception desk at the Cadence booth at times when the expo is open (breaks, lunch, the Wednesday reception). If you miss getting a copy there, then we will also be giving copies away at the Design Automation Conference. I'm not sure what the logistics will be, so look for my DAC 2022 Preview post that I'm sure I will be writing. All being well, we should also have copies of another book too, this one on trends in Automotive (with Robert Schweiger also co-authoring along with Frank and myself).

Fabless

But I also want to plug another book that Daniel Nenni and I wrote several years ago, with a foreword by TSMC's Cliff Hou. Since it is mostly a history of how semiconductors went from the era where every semiconductor company had its own fabs to an era where very few of them did, it is not something that goes out of date. If anything, the message of the book has only got stronger now that there are just three foundries that can build chips that require EUV lithography (plus some dedicated memory fabs). Dan and I revised the book in 2019 to produce a second edition, with a completely new last chapter of predictions (largely written by Wally Rhines).

That book is Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry. If you absolutely have to have a hard copy, then it is available on Amazon for $15. But the SemiWiki book page has a free download. While you are there, you can download the book that Wally Rhines, then CEO of Mentor, told me is "the best book on the EDA industry." I pointed out that this was faint praise since I think it is the only book on the EDA industry. That book is EDAgraffiti, consisting of lightly edited blog posts from my first foray into being a writer when I had no job in the 2008 downturn, so I started doing a daily blog to keep myself sane.

In fact, I'll save you the effort of going to the SemiWiki book page, and you can click on these links:

• Fabless
• EDAgraffiti

One person I think has a lot of insight into the semiconductor industry is Doug Mule, who has a substack called Fabricated Knowledge. He also has a Twitter feed, some of which just crosslink. But at the top of his feed, he has a pinned tweet listing books he read to get up to speed. Or, as he puts it:

One of the books he recommends is Fabless, about which he says:

We all think our own babies are cuter than everyone else's, so it's nice to receive praise, not to mention being included in a list of just 10 books (plus a few honorable mentions).

Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.

.