I attended the recent International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) last week. Many of the sessions are too technical and too far away from high volume manufacture to make good topics for a blog post. As a Fellow from IBM said about 5nm at and earlier IEDM, “none of these ideas will impact 5nm. It takes ten years for a solution to from… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
IEDM: TSMC Ongoing Research on a CFET Process
RISC-V and Chiplets: A Panel Discussion
At the recent RISC-V Summit, the very last session was a panel about chiplets called Chiplets in the RISC-V Ecosystem. It was moderated by Calista Redmond, the CEO of RISC-V International. The panelists were:
- Laurent Moll, COO of Arteris
- Aniket Saha, VP of Product Management of Tenstorrent
- Dale Greenley, VP of Engineering of Ventana
The Path to Chiplet Architecture
If you have anything to do with the semiconductor industry, you already know that one of the hottest areas for both manufacturing and EDA are systems designed with advanced packaging, basically putting more than one die (aka chiplets) in the same package.
When 3D packaging was first introduced, there were not really any effective… Read More
Placement and Clocks for HPC
You are probably familiar with the acronym PPA, which stands for Power/Performance/Area. Sometimes it is PPAC, where C is for cost, since there is more to cost than just area. For example, did you know that adding an additional metal layer to a chip dramatically increases the cost, sometimes by millions of dollars? It requires a … Read More
Mobile Unleashed…Reviewed
I finished reading Don Dingee and Dan Nenni’s book, Mobile Unleashed, the Origin and Evolution of ARM Processors in Our Devices. I guess by way of disclosure I should say that Don and Dan both blogged with me here on SemiWiki for several years before I joined Cadence, and Dan’s last book Fabless was co-authored with me… Read More
Solidly Across the Chasm
Last week I wrote about EDA companies crossing the chasm, with Jim Hogan (who needs no introduction) and Amit Gupta, CEO of Solido. So how did those rules work out for Solido?
See also Getting EDA Across the Chasm: 15 Rules Before and 5 After
The founding team of Solido:
- discovered process variation for analog was a problem as companies
Getting EDA Across the Chasm: 15 Rules Before and 5 After
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore (not that G. Moore!) is one of the most well known books on high technology marketing. When I worked at VaST, Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV) invested in us and Moore (not Mohr), who was a partner there, spent an afternoon with us brainstorming what it would take for us to cross the chasm. Coincidentally,… Read More
EDA By the Numbers, Phil Kaufman, Emerging Companies and More
The quarterly numbers are out from the EDAC Market Statistics Service (MSS) for Q2. The headline number is that revenue for the industry increased by 8.5% for Q2 to $1906.5M versus $1759.9M in Q2 last year. The four quarter moving average, that smooths out a lot of seasonality by comparing the most recent four quarters to the prior… Read More
Samsung Device Solutions Has a New Home
Last week it was the formal opening of Samsung’s new office building in North San Jose. They have brought together all of semiconductor device solutions in a huge new office building. The building can hold 2000 people. Samsung Device Solutions consists of:
- memory
- system LSI
- LED
- display
Dr OH Kwan, the CEO of Samsung Electronics,… Read More
The Rosetta Stone of…Actually, the Real One
Last week I wrote about the British Museum Algorithm in the context of simulation corners for variability. You walk everywhere. And if you don’t walk to just the right place, you miss something. Just like visiting the British Museum. Today I’m going totally off-topic to talk about something that really is in the British Museum, … Read More
Semiconductors Slowing in 2025