At Intel back in the late 1970’s we wanted to know what process corner each DRAM chip and wafer was trending at so we included a handful of test transistors in the scribe lines between the active die. Having test transistors meant that we could do a quick electrical test at wafer probe time to measure the P and N channel transistor… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
In-System Automotive Test
I’ve been driving cars since 1975 and in the early days we had simplistic gauges for feedback like: Speed, Fuel level, Oil level, RPM. Back then when you popped the hood of a car you could see through the engine compartment onto the ground below, however with today’s cars the engine compartments are crammed with tubes,… Read More
Automotive Mega-trends, Safety and Requirements Management
I come from a car-centric family where my father actually bought and sold over 300 vehicles in his lifetime, so automotive mega-trends pique my interest. A new conference called Semiconductors ISO 26262 held it’s first annual event last month, meeting in Munich with guest speakers from some impressive companies like: … Read More
Designing an SoC for 3D TV Without using the Funny Glasses
In the blur of activities at DAC last year I visited the Mentor booth a few times and had just a few minutes to glance at a 3D TV display that didn’t require me to wear any funny glasses, kind of novel I thought at the time because I’ve read that the market of 3D TV sets is being hampered by requiring viewers to wear glasses. The… Read More
Moore’s Law Drives Foundries and IP Providers
2017 was a banner year for semiconductor sales as they topped $400B for the first time, an increase of some 20%, there is happiness in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, South Korea, and well, everywhere. With the foundries pushing to ever-smaller process dimensions and even going back to mature nodes and offering more variations that are… Read More
Bicycles, Electronics and CES 2018
I’m an avid road bike enthusiast having just completed my 2017 goal of 13,000 miles, so follow me on Strava if you want to see the routes and photo adventures I have in Oregon. In the photo below I’m the guy in the middle with the Portland Velojersey on and we’re in a parking lot just 2 blocks away from Intel’s… Read More
A Picture is worth a 1,000 words
Semiconductor IP re-use is a huge part of the productivity gains in SoC designs, so instead of starting from a clean slate most chip engineers are re-using cells, blocks, modules and even sub-systems from previous designs in order to meet their schedule and stay competitive in the market place. But what happens when you intend to… Read More
Embedded In-chip Monitoring, Webinar Recap
Six years ago I first interviewed Stephen Crosher, CEO and Co-founder of Moortecas they were in startup mode with some new semiconductor IP for temperature sensing, and earlier this month I attended their webinar all about embedded in-chip monitoring to get caught up with their technology and growing success. Ramsay Allen is … Read More
35 Semiconductor IP Companies Hold 2nd Annual Conference
Our smart phone driven semiconductor economy consumes a lot of IP blocks to enable quick product development cycles, often annually updating with new models to choose from. So where do you find all of the best semiconductor IP, verification IP and embedded software? Well, one place is at the 2nd annual REUSE conference, scheduled… Read More
Making Your Next Chip Self-Aware
One holy grail of AI software developers is to create a system that is self-aware, or sentient. A less lofty goal than sentient AI is for chip designers to know how each specific chip responds to Process variations, Voltage levels and Temperature changes. If a design engineer knew exactly which process corner that each chip was fabricated… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing