I wanted to share with you the following article that was published by EE Times which highlighted the top 10 MCU stories of 2015 and listed as number four IBM’s demonstration of 7-nanometer node finned field effect transistors (FinFETS), in partnership with SUNY Polytechnic Institute and joint development alliance with GlobalFoundries and Samsung:

EE Times: EE Times Top 10 MCU Stories of 2015

Susan Rambo, Designline Editor | 12/29/15

Merger madness and Moore's Law sucked the air out of the room for this year's readers of EE Times' Microcontroller Designline.

Looking back at a year's worth of stories on EE Times' Microcontroller Designline returns a mix of bigger picture stories and some oldie how-to's (who knows what lurks in the databases of EE Times). The pure product announcement stories are fewer on EE Times, but even the big MCU-specific stories get overshadowed by this years' merger madness and Moore's Law.

Stories such as TI's 32-bit 'Successor' to the 16-bit MCU or Startup Goes Multi-Die to Customize MCUs are in the top thirty. But here are the top 10 stories:

10. Intel, Samsung Up, Qualcomm, Toshiba Down in Chip Vendor Ranking by Peter Clarke 4/10/2015 Gartner Inc. has produced an updated top-ten chip vendor ranking for 2014 based on companies' final financial results.

9. AMD Slips From Ranking of Top 20 Chip Vendors by Dylan McGrath 8/7/2015 A rough first half to the year, including a devastating second quarter, drops AMD from the list for first time in decades.

8. Intel Rolls 14nm Broadwell in Vegas by Jessica Lipksy 1/2/2015 Intel announced at CES 2015 the Broadwell family, its fifth-generation Core processors. The 14 new chips are essentially versions of its 22nm Haswell architecture made in its new 14nm process, providing enhancements it hopes encourage PC and notebook users to upgrade.

7. Moore's Law: Dead or Alive by R. Colin Johnson 4/17/2015 Moore's law is still alive and kicking after 50 years, but here are the technologies that are busting and boosting it in the 21st century. Here are the busters and boosters determining its future.

6. Analog-to-Digital Converters by Stuart Ball 5/1/2001 An old Embedded Systems Programming story that ended up on EE Times: The usual method of bringing analog inputs into a microprocessor is to use an analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Here are some tips for selecting such a part and calibrating it to fit your needs.

5. Embedded Systems Programming Languages by Colin Walls 9/12/2014 Specialized languages have been developed to address the unique requirements of embedded developers, but none have found universal acceptance.

4. IBM Leapfrogs Intel to 7nm by R. Colin Johnson 7/9/2015 IBM is the first semiconductor maker to demonstrate a 7-nanometer node finned field effect transistorS (FinFETS) in alliance partnership with SUNY Polytechnic Institute's Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (Albany, New York) and joint development alliance with GlobalFoundries and Samsung.

Read More