Popular companies designing smart phones, CPUs, GPUs and Memory components all employ teams of custom IC designers to create the highest performance chips that are as small as possible, and at the lowest costs. How do they go about doing custom IC design migration and optimization when moving from one process node to another one?… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Low Frequency Noise Challenges IC Designs
AMS and RF IC designers have known for years that their circuits are sensitive to noise, because if you amplify noise on an input source to an amplifier circuit then your chip can start to produce wrong answers. Even digital SoC designers need to start taking notice because every SoC is filled with SRAM IP blocks, and at each shrinking… Read More
Did My FPGA Just Fail?
Designing DRAMs at Intel back in the 1970s I first learned about Soft Errors and the curious effect of higher failure rates of DRAM chips in Denver, Colorado with a higher altitude than Aloha, OR. With the rapid growth of FPGA-based designs in 2016, we are still asking the same questions about the reliability of our chips used for safety-critical… Read More
Are Your Transistor Models Good Enough?
SoC designers can now capture their design ideas with high-level languages like C and SystemC, then synthesize those abstractions down into RTL code or gates, however in the end the physical IC is implemented using cell libraries made up of transistors. Circuit designers use simulation tools like SPICE on these transistor-level… Read More
Catching low-power simulation bugs earlier and faster
I’ve owned and used many generations of cell phones, starting back in the 1980’s with the Motorola DynaTAC phone and the biggest usability factor has always been the battery life, just how many hours of standby time will this phone provide and how many minutes of actual talk time before the battery needs to be recharged… Read More
A Software Company Making Hardware
I’ve been a daily Facebook user for many years now and it keeps me in touch with family, friends, some business contacts and even a handful of high-tech companies. My first impression is that Facebook is a very successful, cloud-based, social platform staffed with software developers and a few marketing mavens. On closer… Read More
At What Point Does Transistor Gate Length Stop Getting Smaller?
When I started doing IC design back in 1978 we had 6,000 nm channel gate lengths, and today you can buy a smart phone with 16 nm or 14 nm technology, although the gate lengths in those phones are more like 34 nm. The International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors (ITRS) makes predictions about emerging trends in our industry and… Read More
Reducing Data Centre Cooling by 40%
Living in Oregon has many benefits, including access to cheap electricity thanks to the plentiful river systems that provide hydro power and a growing green power business fueled by wind and sun. Many of the world’s largest data centers are located in Oregon for access to this cheap electricity, and Google has a sizable investment… Read More
New Transistor Sizing Company at #53DAC
I first met Herve Guegan at Mentor Graphics back in the late 90’s when he managed a group of developers for the SPICE circuit simulator called Eldo in Grenoble, France. We’ve kept in touch over the years and he asked to meet me at DAC in Austin this year, so I caught up with him to get an update on his latest start-up company… Read More
5 Reasons Why Platform Based Design Can Help Your Next SoC
Semiconductor design IP and verification IP have been around for decades, but just because your company has lots of IP doesn’t mean that you’re getting all of the benefits of a design reuse methodology. Maybe your business has encountered some of the following issues:










Intel: Pushing EMIB Forward: Design Methodology Insights with Synopsys Tools