Non-volatile memory is used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial applications and comes in an array of architectures like Serial Flash and CBRAM (Conductive Bridging RAM). I caught up with Shane Hollmer by phone this week to gain some insight into a recent acquisition of Atmel’s serial flash components, and how that… Read More
Author: Daniel Payne
Double Patterning for IC Design, Extraction and Signoff
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
Is the RTL Design Flow Broken?
I’ve taught Verilog classes and used logic synthesis tools for ASIC and FPGA designs, so was interested to hear about Oasys Design Systems. I attended their webinar at 9AM today, so I’ll share what I learned about their approach to logical and physical synthesis. This approach competes with tools like Design Compiler… Read More
IC Design at Analog Bits
This morning I spoke with Mahesh Tirupattur, Executive VP of Analog Bits about IC design challenges and using EDA tools to create high performance, mixed-signal semiconductor IP.
Online Schematic Capture and SPICE Circuit Simulation
I love all things SPICE so when I read a tweet tonight from @PartSimI just had to try out their Schematic Capture and SPICE circuit simulator in a browser. The site is www.partsim.com and all you need is a web browser and short registration process, then it’s off to the Examples where I found a simple CMOS inverter and then extended… Read More
Engineer to Engineer, Embedded Instrumentation
Last month the folks at Tektronix did something very useful, they invited 30 engineers to talk directly with their chief engineer of embedded instrumentation as part of “Meet the Experts” in Santa Clara, CA.
Brad Quinton, Chief Architect created a new and efficient approach of embedding instrumentation in your … Read More
Phablet, e-reader, Nexus
In November and December I upgraded three devices and share my opinions on the utility of each:
- Samsung Galaxy Note (aka Phablet = Phone + Tablet)
- Kindle Paperwhite (e-reader)
- Google Nexus 7 (Tablet)
IP Scoring Using TSMC DFM Kits
Design For Manufacturing (DFM) is the art and science of making an IC design yield better in order to receive a higher ROI. Ian Smith, an AE from Mentor in the Calibre group presented a pertinent webinar, IP Scoring Using TSMC DFM Kits. I’ll provide an overview of what I learned at this webinar.… Read More
FinFET Modeling and Extraction at 16-nm
In 2012 FinFET is one of the most talked about MOS technologies of the year because traditional planar CMOS has slowed down on scaling below the 28nm node. To learn more about FinFET process modeling I attended a Synopsys webinar where Bari Biswas presented for about 42 minutes include a Q&A portion at the end.
Bari Biswas, Synopsys… Read More
A Comparison of SemiWiki and DeepChip
An email update from John Cooley at DeepChip this morning prompted the bloggers here at SemiWiki to continue the discussion and point out incorrect data, so that readers realize what is really happening with our media portals as sources of timely and relevant news and opinion. I respect what John Cooley has done with DeepChip over… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot