Author: Paul McLellan

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Intel’s 22nm Process. Atom, ARM, Apple

Intel’s 22nm Process. Atom, ARM, Apple
by Paul McLellan on 05-05-2011 at 9:52 am
Categories: Arm, Foundries, Intel, IP

Intel had a big press event yesterday at which they announced details of their 22nm process. In a change from their current processes, it goes with a vertical gate. In fact 3 gates which gives them much better control of leakage through transistors that are switched off, along with more transmission through the on transistors. They… Read More

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Chip Power Models

Chip Power Models
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2011 at 4:21 pm
Categories: Ansys, Inc., EDA

As the complexity of the chip-package-system (CPS) interactions has increased, the tradeoffs in doing a power and noise analysis has had to gradually increase. As is so often the case in semiconductor designs, issues first arise as second-order effects that can largely be ignored but each process node makes the problem worse … Read More

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Apache at DAC

Apache at DAC
by Paul McLellan on 05-04-2011 at 2:38 pm
Categories: Ansys, Inc., EDA

DAC is less than a month away, June 6-8th for the tradeshow, longer depending on what other events you might also be attending. Apache is in booth 2448 (marked in red on the DAC floorplan map.

Many of the presentations at the Apache booth will be customers (such as ARM, Xilinx, ST Ericsson, GlobalFoundries and TSMC) discussing various… Read More

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Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx and Crossover Designs

Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx and Crossover Designs
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2011 at 4:14 pm
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA

I was at Mentor’s u2u (user group) meeting and one of the keynotes was by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx. The other was by Wally Rhines and is summarized here.

Ivo started off talking analogizing SoCs as the sports-cars of the industry (fast but expensive), and FPGAs as the station wagons (not cool). In fact he even said that when Xilinx… Read More

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Wally’s u2u keynote

Wally’s u2u keynote
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2011 at 3:25 pm
Categories: EDA, Siemens EDA

I was at Wally’s u2u (Mentor user group) keynote yesterday. The other keynote was by Ivo Bolsens of Xilinx and is here. He started off by looking at how the semiconductor industry has recovered and silicon area shipments are now back on trend after a pronounced drop in 2009 and revenue has followed. Finally the semiconductor… Read More

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The World’s Smallest Printed Circuit Boards: interposers

The World’s Smallest Printed Circuit Boards: interposers
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2011 at 1:38 pm
Categories: FPGA, Xilinx

Have you ever had the experience where you look up some unusual word in the dictionary since you don’t remember seeing it before. And then, in the next few weeks you keep coming across it. Twice in the last week I have been in presentations about the economics of putting die onto silicon interposers and the possibility of a new… Read More

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Semiconductor RTL Power Analysis: the sweet spot

Semiconductor RTL Power Analysis: the sweet spot
by Paul McLellan on 04-26-2011 at 4:20 pm
Categories: Ansys, Inc., EDA

Power has become the strongest driver of semiconductor design today, more important than area, more important than timing. Whether the device is handheld, like a wireless phone, or tethered, like a router, complex power and energy requirements must be met. Shrinking geometries continue to impose new challenges as power management… Read More

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Thanks for the memory

Thanks for the memory
by Paul McLellan on 04-20-2011 at 1:26 am
Categories: Uncategorized
1 Comment

One of the most demanding areas of layout design has always been memories. Whereas digital design often uses somewhat simplified design rules, memories have to be designed pushing every rule to the limit. Obviously even a tiny improvement in the size of a bit cell multiplies up into significant area savings when there are billions… Read More

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Intel Buys an ARMy. Maybe

Intel Buys an ARMy. Maybe
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2011 at 5:18 pm
Categories: Arm, Foundries, Intel, IP

Is Intel in trouble? Since it is the #1 semiconductor company and, shipping 22nm in Q4 this year with 14nm in 2013, it is two process generations ahead of everyone else it is hard to see why it would be. Intel, of course, continues to dominate the market for chips for notebooks, desktops and servers. But therein lies the problem. Pads… Read More

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Semiconductor Virtual Platform Models

Semiconductor Virtual Platform Models
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2011 at 3:38 pm
Categories: EDA

Virtual platforms have been an area that has some powerful value propositions for both architectural analysis and for software development. But the fundamental weakness has been the modeling problem. People want fast and accurate models but this turns out to be a choice.

The first issue is that there is an unavoidable tradeoff… Read More