Low power techniques

Low power techniques
by Paul McLellan on 12-08-2011 at 5:49 pm

There was recently a forum discussion about the best low power techniques. Not surprisingly we didn’t come up with a new technique nobody had ever thought of but it was an interesting discussion.

First there are the techniques that by now have become standard. If anyone wants more details on these then two good resources are… Read More


Driving in the bus lane

Driving in the bus lane
by Paul McLellan on 12-08-2011 at 1:16 pm

Modern microprocessor and memory designs often have hundreds of datapaths that traverse the width of the chip, many of them very wide (over one thousand signals). To meet signal timing and slope targets for these buses, designers must insert repeater cells to improve the speed of the signal. Until now, the operations associated… Read More


Mark Milligan joins Springsoft

Mark Milligan joins Springsoft
by Paul McLellan on 12-06-2011 at 2:01 pm

Mark Milligan recently joined SpringSoft as VP Corporate Marketing. I sat down with him on Monday to get his perspective on things.

He started life, as so many of us, as an engineer. He was an ASIC designer working on low-level microcode for the Navy Standard Airborne Computer at Control Data. It was actually the first ASIC that they… Read More


Nvidia’s Chris Malachowsky on "Watt’s next"

Nvidia’s Chris Malachowsky on "Watt’s next"
by Paul McLellan on 12-06-2011 at 12:31 pm

The video and slides of the CEDA lunch from a month or two ago are now (finally) up here. Chris Malachowsky presented “Watt’s next.” Chris is one of the founders of nVidia and is currently its senior VP of research. He started by talking a bit about the nVidia product line but moved on to talking about supercomputers… Read More


Interoperability Forum

Interoperability Forum
by Paul McLellan on 12-03-2011 at 3:19 pm


Earlier this week I went to the Synopsys Interoperability Forum. The big news of the day turned out to be Synopsys wanting to be more than interoperable with Magma, but that only got announced after we’d all gone away.

Philippe Margashack of ST opened, reviewing his slides from a presentation at the same forum from 10 years … Read More


It’s not just handsets

It’s not just handsets
by Paul McLellan on 11-30-2011 at 7:58 pm

I usually write about the handset business (terminals in wireless-speak) because it is a consumer business and drives, directly and indirectly, a large part of the semiconductor business. But there is another part to the business, base-stations.

The largest supplier of wireless networking equipment is Ericsson. Ericsson … Read More


Synopsys acquires Magma

Synopsys acquires Magma
by Paul McLellan on 11-30-2011 at 4:41 pm

So Synopsys announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Magma. There will be a regulatory delay etc before it finally closes.

So why did they do it? Despite Magma being thought of as a place and route company, they have two other product that are perhaps more significant for Synopsys: FineSim and Tekton.

FineSim, Magma’s… Read More


Blitz, blazing fast layout

Blitz, blazing fast layout
by Paul McLellan on 11-29-2011 at 8:00 am

One of the challenges with today’s SoCs is that chip-finishing, putting the final touches to the SoC working at the chip level, stresses layout editors to the limit. Either they run out of capacity to load the entire chip, or they can handle the entire chip but everything is like wading through molasses, it takes an awfully … Read More


David Liu, Kauffmann Award winner

David Liu, Kauffmann Award winner
by Paul McLellan on 11-22-2011 at 6:16 pm

David Liu receeived the Kaufman award for 2001 at the Kaufman award dinner a few weeks ago.

Or to be more formal about it:Dr. C. L. David Liu, the William Mong honorary chair professor of Computer Science and former president of the National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan, will be presented with this year’s Phil Kaufman Award… Read More