IEDM: What Comes After Silicon?

IEDM: What Comes After Silicon?
by Paul McLellan on 01-09-2024 at 10:00 am

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The annual International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) took place last month. One of the presentations on the short course was by Matthew Metz of Intel titled New Materials Systems for Moore’s Law Continuation. In essence this was a look at some of the possibilities for what comes after silicon runs out of steam.

Matthew started… Read More


IEDM: TSMC Ongoing Research on a CFET Process

IEDM: TSMC Ongoing Research on a CFET Process
by Paul McLellan on 12-18-2023 at 6:00 am

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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


RISC-V and Chiplets: A Panel Discussion

RISC-V and Chiplets: A Panel Discussion
by Paul McLellan on 12-13-2023 at 10:00 am

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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
Read More

The Path to Chiplet Architecture

The Path to Chiplet Architecture
by Paul McLellan on 10-19-2023 at 10:00 am

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

Placement and Clocks for HPC
by Paul McLellan on 10-11-2023 at 10:00 am

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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

Mobile Unleashed…Reviewed
by Paul McLellan on 04-07-2016 at 10:00 am

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

Solidly Across the Chasm
by Paul McLellan on 10-05-2015 at 12:00 pm

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
Read More

Getting EDA Across the Chasm: 15 Rules Before and 5 After

Getting EDA Across the Chasm: 15 Rules Before and 5 After
by Paul McLellan on 10-02-2015 at 7:00 am

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

EDA By the Numbers, Phil Kaufman, Emerging Companies and More
by Paul McLellan on 10-01-2015 at 7:00 am

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

Samsung Device Solutions Has a New Home
by Paul McLellan on 09-30-2015 at 7:00 am

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