TSMC 10nm Readiness and 3DIC

TSMC 10nm Readiness and 3DIC
by Paul McLellan on 05-03-2015 at 1:00 am

At the TSMC Technology Symposium last month Suk Lee presented a lot of information on design enablement. Suk is an interesting guy with a unique background in ASIC, Semiconductor, EDA, and now Foundry. In baseball terms that would be like playing infield, outfield, home plate, and umpire!

Around the turn of the millennium Suk actually… Read More


How Good Are Your Clocks?

How Good Are Your Clocks?
by Paul McLellan on 04-29-2015 at 7:00 am

One of the trickiest tasks in designing a modern SoC is getting the clock tree(s) right. The two big reasons for this:

  • the clocks can consume 30% or more of the power of the whole chip, so minimizing the number of buffers inserted is critical to keeping power under control
  • the clock insertion delay and clock skew have a major impact on
Read More

Linley: Mobile Peaked in 2013?

Linley: Mobile Peaked in 2013?
by Paul McLellan on 04-28-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week was the Linley Mobile Conference. Mobile is a huge semiconductor market and, outside of Intel, is the main driver for next generation process technologies. A new generation of mobile phones comes along, fills the leading edge fabs for a year or two and then moves on to the next generation. Nothing comes close to requiring… Read More


GlobalFoundries: 14 in 15 in 8

GlobalFoundries: 14 in 15 in 8
by Paul McLellan on 04-26-2015 at 1:00 am

How is that for a cryptic title? It is GlobalFoundries’ rallying cry. Their big focus is to bring up 14nm during 2015 in fab 8 in Malta NY.

Last week I chatted to Shubhankar Basu. He is the senior product line manager for leading edge technologies. Not surprisingly, that means he is currently leading the 14nm FinFET business. He told… Read More


Agile IC: All You Gotta Do To Join Is…

Agile IC: All You Gotta Do To Join Is…
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2015 at 7:00 am

Back last October 1st was an announcement of Agile IC Methodology. As I said then:Today Sonics has launched the Agile IC Methodology along with several collaborators. The initial phase is to create a LinkedIn group to start the discussion.

See also Agile IC Development

At that point there was just an idea and a LinkedIn group. The… Read More


Imec Technology Forum

Imec Technology Forum
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2015 at 7:00 am

I like to quiz people on which country is the one where the most leading edge research on semiconductors is done. People reflexively answer USA or maybe Taiwan or Japan. Nobody who doesn’t already know the answer would pick Belgium. After all the EU headquarters is there not because Belgium is important but because Belgium… Read More


Are There Trojans in Your Silicon? You Don’t Know

Are There Trojans in Your Silicon? You Don’t Know
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2015 at 7:00 am

Yesterday was the Mentor users’ group U2U. As usual, Wally Rhines gave the keynote, this year entitled Secure Silicon, Enabler for the Internet of Things. Wally started off saying it was a challenge to find a new angle. The number of news articles on cloud computing has exploded from nothing to 72,000 last year. On IoT from … Read More


Top 10 Reasons to Use Industry-standard Data Management

Top 10 Reasons to Use Industry-standard Data Management
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2015 at 7:00 am

Should a semiconductor/IP company use a proprietary data-management (DM) environment? Or even develop their own? After all, every company is unique and developing a unique DM allows a perfect match of just what is required for that particular company. And, in principle, a proprietary DM system can underpin the design management… Read More


Silvaco: TCAD to Signoff in Vertical Markets

Silvaco: TCAD to Signoff in Vertical Markets
by Paul McLellan on 04-18-2015 at 8:00 pm

Recently, I talked about meeting with Dave Dutton the CEO of Silvaco. Mainly we were talking about the recent acquisition of Invarian but he also brought me up to date on Silvaco and how he is bringing their disparate product lines into a more focused strategy.

See also Silvaco Swallows Invarian

Silvaco would be the first to admit … Read More


Coventor, Lego and IoT in Denmark

Coventor, Lego and IoT in Denmark
by Paul McLellan on 04-17-2015 at 7:00 am

Coventor were in Copenhagen Denmark a few weeks ago at the Smart Systems Integration Conference to talk about MEMS and IoT entitled (take a deep breath) Towards a Lego Block Principle for Heterogonous Systems Design Including MEMS and Electronics—Choose and Put Together Fit. Since this seems to have become IoT week for me, without… Read More