Silicon Creations talks about 7nm IP Verification for AMS Circuits

Silicon Creations talks about 7nm IP Verification for AMS Circuits
by Daniel Payne on 10-24-2017 at 12:00 pm

Designing at 7nm is a big deal because of the costs to make masks and then produce silicon that yields at an acceptable level, and Silicon Creations is one company that has the experience in designing AMS IP like: PLL, Serializer-Deserializer, IOs, Oscillators. Why design at 7nm? Lots of reasons – lower power, higher speeds,… Read More


Rethinking IP Lifecycle Management

Rethinking IP Lifecycle Management
by Daniel Payne on 10-18-2017 at 12:00 pm

We recently saw both Apple and Samsung introduce new smart phones, and realize that the annual race to introduce sophisticated devices that are attractive and differentiated is highly competitive. If either of these companies misses a market window then fortunes can quickly change. SoCs with billions of transistors like smart… Read More


Webinar on Electrochemistry and how it affects Semiconductor devices

Webinar on Electrochemistry and how it affects Semiconductor devices
by Daniel Payne on 10-09-2017 at 12:00 pm

My educational background is Electrical Engineering and I’ve learned a lot since starting in the industry back in 1978 while working on bipolar, NMOS and CMOS technology, designing DRAM, data controller and GPU devices. I continue to learn about the semiconductor industry through daily reading and attending trade shows… Read More


Portable Stimulus Standard, What’s New from Cadence

Portable Stimulus Standard, What’s New from Cadence
by Daniel Payne on 09-27-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been hearing about the Portable Stimulus Standard (PSS) since DAC 2016, so it’s helpful to get an update from EDA vendors on what their involvement level is with this emerging standard and how they see it helping design and verification engineers. Earlier in September I scheduled a conference call with Cadence… Read More


Improved Memory Design, Characterization and Verification

Improved Memory Design, Characterization and Verification
by Daniel Payne on 09-19-2017 at 12:00 pm

My IC design career started out with DRAM design, characterization and verification back in the 1970’s, so I vividly recall how much SPICE circuit simulation was involved, and how little automation we had back in the day, so we tended to cobble together our own scripts to help automate the process a bit. With each new process… Read More


Semiconductor Device Physics, Lab in a Box

Semiconductor Device Physics, Lab in a Box
by Daniel Payne on 09-13-2017 at 12:00 pm

One of my favorite classes in college was the lab exercise, mostly because we actually got to use real electronics and then measure something, finally writing it up in our lab notebooks. The issue today is that a college student taking Electrical Engineering probably doesn’t have much access to 10nm FinFET silicon for use… Read More


Webinar: Mobile Device Companies Get New Sensor Interconnect Standard

Webinar: Mobile Device Companies Get New Sensor Interconnect Standard
by Daniel Payne on 09-04-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’ve been a mobile device user since the 1980’s when the Motorola brick phone was introduced, so I’ve seen an increasing amount of sensors added to each new generation of mobile phones over the years. One big challenge to both sensor companies and fabless semiconductor companies designing SoCs for mobile devices… Read More


Getting More Productive Coding with SystemVerilog

Getting More Productive Coding with SystemVerilog
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2017 at 12:00 pm

HDL languages are a matter of engineering personal preference and often corporate policy dictates which language you should be using on your next SoC design. In the early days we used our favorite text-based editor like Vi or Emacs, my choice was Vi. The problem with these text-based editors of course is that they really don’t… Read More


Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC

Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 08-24-2017 at 12:00 pm

I’m a user of many Samsung products as my family has Samsung Galaxy smart phones and my MacBook Pro uses Samsung SSD for storage, so at DAC I attended a breakfast panel with presenters from Samsung, Synopsys and Qualcomm. This was the second day of DAC and they served us breakfast, and with the big names on the panel the room was… Read More