Industry Expert Blogs

Chipworks buys hundreds of devices every year and strips them down to look at the silicon that is in them. In some cases, they go much further, decap the chips, and work their way down the layers so that they know which process it is in, how many tracks the standard cell libraries use, whether it was laid out by hand, and so on. At the start of this year, they merged with TechInsights. The second-day keynote at the Linley Mobile and Wearables Conference had a keynote by Jim Morrison ("not the dead one" he said, referring to the lead singer of The Doors) called State of the Art in Smartphones and Wearables. Since January 2015, up until last week they have 400 smartphones and 75 watches and wearables.