Variation analysis continues to be increasingly important as process technology moves to more advanced nodes. It comes as no surprise that tool development in this area has been vigorous and aggressive. New higher reliability IC applications, larger memory sizes and much higher production volumes require sophisticated yield… Read More
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SPI Inspires a New Generation of SOC Designs
When I started dabbling in hardware again for fun using Arduinos about five years ago, it had been a long time since I had played with microprocessor chips. The epiphany for me was seeing how easy it was to load programs onto the onboard flash on something like an Atmel AVR using the SPI interface. My previous experience decades early… Read More
Calling on #IoTman to save humanity!
We, in the hi-tech community, tend to gravitate towards the technology, the API, the device, the platform, the processes node and to forget the goal behind all of those items. We have all noticed the platform wars and cloud API struggle for #IoT market domination. Someone needs to bring back the discussion to the top level, to why … Read More
It’s Time to Put Your Spice Netlists on a Diet
Spice circuit simulation remains the backbone of IC design validation. Digital cell library developers rely upon Spice for circuit characterization, to provide the data for Liberty models. Memory IP designers utilize additional Spice features to perform statistical sampling. Analog and I/O interface designers extend these… Read More
The Importance of Transistor-Level Verification
According to the IEEE Std 1012-2012, verification is the acknowledgement that a product is in satisfactory condition by meeting a set of rigorous criteria. [3] Transistor-level verification involves the use of custom libraries and design models to achieve ultimate performance, low power, or layout density. [2] Prediction… Read More
SEMATECH, Silvaco and SRAM
SEMATECH has been around for over 20 years, starting in Austin. Today it is in upstate New York which increasingly seems to be the area for semiconductor research with IBM (still doing research although they sold their semiconductor business to GlobalFoundries), GlobalFoundries’ own Fab 8, the College of Nanoscale Science… Read More
Silvaco 30 Years Ago
It’s Silvaco’s 30 year anniversary. You may already know the dry official story of the early days:
- Founded in 1984 by Dr Ivan Pesic
- In 1984 the initial product, Utmost, quickly became the industry standard for parameter extraction, device characterization and modeling.
- In 1985 Silvaco entered the SPICE circuit
The Transistor is the Foundation of TCAD to Signoff
At the most basic level, semiconductor design is all about transistors. Any report on a large microprocessor or mobile application processor is in awe about how many transistors it contains. Moore’s Law is all about the most economic way to manufacture transistors. Each process generation for the last decade and looking ahead… Read More
High-Voltage Power Design
Most of what is talked about on SemiWiki is silicon design. After all for regular SoCs it is the only game in town. But for high voltage power applications (think automotive for one big market) there are other more esoteric technologies becoming more attractive.
Silicon has been the material of choice for high-voltage power applications… Read More
Heterogeneous Processing: Power Reduction and Performance Advances
Implementation of Heterogeneous processors has shown demonstrated reduction in power consumption and improved performance in mobile processors like ARM_big.LITTLE technology, where low power and relatively slower cores are coupled with the more powerful ARM cores. According to ARM Holdings, it can save 75% of CPU energy… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki