Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools

Samsung 14nm FinFET Design with Cadence Tools
by Daniel Payne on 09-22-2014 at 5:30 pm

The first consumer products with 20nm processing are arriving in 2014 like the 2 billion transistor A8 chip in the iPhone 6, however at the 14nm node there are new designs underway to continue the trend of Moore’s Law. To get a better feel for the challenges of designing with 14nm FinFET technology I watched a 23 minute video … Read More


Transceiver Verification of a 20nm Altera FPGA Device

Transceiver Verification of a 20nm Altera FPGA Device
by Daniel Payne on 09-11-2014 at 6:00 pm

FPGA devices are a great way to drive silicon technology development because they contain both digital and analog IP, along with sophisticated IO cells. The highest performance IOs are transceivers, and Altera has recently designed the Arria 10 device family to include up to 96 transceivers, using a 20nm technology that can achieve… Read More


What Apple Talked About on 9/9/2014

What Apple Talked About on 9/9/2014
by Daniel Payne on 09-09-2014 at 5:00 pm

In America the popular press talks almost non-stop about: Disasters, politicians, celebrities and Apple. Yes, Apple. Today I watched the live cast of the new Apple product announcements.

iPhone 6
First, the see things differently video started playing, then the live stream died so I had to turn over to CNET where they were live … Read More


Power and Thermal Analysis of Data Center and Server ICs

Power and Thermal Analysis of Data Center and Server ICs
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2014 at 4:00 pm

The server market is a diverse, yet standardized market. The ICs and components designed and manufactured in final assemblies must meet form factor requirements for rack mount and blades. The form factor enclosures and the component placement dictate the thermal-mechanical properties and hence the thermal cooling limits … Read More


TCAD to SPICE Simulation of Power Devices

TCAD to SPICE Simulation of Power Devices
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2014 at 1:30 pm

The periodic table shows that Silicon (Si) is in a column along with other elements like Carbon (C) and Germanium (Ge). With so much emphasis on Silicon, you’d think that the other semiconductor materials have been neglected a bit.

Silicon is a wonderful material and most of our consumer electronics and handheld devices … Read More


Assertion Synthesis: From Startup to Mainstream

Assertion Synthesis: From Startup to Mainstream
by Daniel Payne on 08-30-2014 at 7:00 am

In college many of us dreamed of starting up our own company by offering something new that has never been done before. Today I spoke by phone with Yunshan Zhuin Shanghai, and he has actually lived out this scenario by founding NextOp in 2006, then getting that company acquired by Atrentain 2012. The new capability that NextOp created… Read More


FinFET Design for Power, Noise and Reliability

FinFET Design for Power, Noise and Reliability
by Daniel Payne on 08-29-2014 at 4:00 pm

IC designers have been running analysis tools for power, noise and reliability for many years now, so what is new when you start using FinFET transistors instead of planar transistors? Calvin Chow from ANSYS (Apache Design) presented on this topic earlier in the summer through a 33 minutewebinar that has been archived. There is… Read More


Transistor-level Sizing Optimization

Transistor-level Sizing Optimization
by Daniel Payne on 08-29-2014 at 4:00 pm

RTL designers know that their code gets transformed into gates and cells by using a logic synthesis tool, however these gates and cells are further comprised of transistors and sometimes you really need to optimize the transistor sizing to reach power, performance and area goals. I’ve done transistor-level IC design before,… Read More


FinFETs for your Next SoC

FinFETs for your Next SoC
by Daniel Payne on 08-24-2014 at 7:00 am

Planar CMOS processes have been offered for decades now, and all the way down through the 28nm node it has been riding the benefits of Moore’s Law. A few years back we started hearing from Intel about TriGate (aka FinFET) starting at the 22nm node as a way to use a more 3D processing approach for transistors instead of planar CMOS.… Read More


IoT Application: Road Biking Fitness

IoT Application: Road Biking Fitness
by Daniel Payne on 08-10-2014 at 8:00 pm

Eleven months ago I started a fitness kick in order to lose some weight, get healthy and have more energy, so I picked a familiar activity, road cycling. Being an engineer I have always loved measuring things, like my speed and distance, however I had an old-fashioned cyclocomputer called the Cateye Velo 2. This device connected … Read More