DAC starts in San Francisco on June 8th. The kickoff keynote at 9.20am that morning is by Brian Otis of Google. He is a director at Google[x]. According to Wikipedia:Google X, stylized as Google[x], is a semi-secret facility run by Google dedicated to making major technological advancements. It is located about a half mile from … Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
EDPS: Fins and FinFETs
Look at those dolphins with fins on their backs. Did you know that FinFETs are actually named after them since Chenming Hu and his team though that they looked like a fish’s fin? And since they invented FinFETs they got to name them too. But those dolphins also mean that it is nearly time for this years Electronic Design Process… Read More
What is Skipper?
What is Skipper? Well, it seems it’s a penguin in the movie Madagascar. And one of Barbie’s sisters. Who knew? But for Semiwiki readers it’s an integrated chip finishing platform from ICScape. Skipper can read in full-chip layout extremely fast, examine it and manipulate it in various ways, and write it out again.… Read More
Linley Mobile Microprocessor Conference
As The Who sang on Who’s Next:Keep me movin’, groovin’, groovin’, yeah
Movin’, Yeah
Mobile, mobile, mobile, mobile, …
On April 22nd and 23rd the place to be moving (or movin’) to will be the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. Because What’s Next is this year’s Linley Mobile Conference… Read More
The Earth is Not Flat; Neither is IP
Chip design is largely about assembling pre-designed IP, either developed in other groups in the same company, or brought in from a 3rd party, or occasionally developed within the SoC design group itself. But that makes it sound like it is a bunch of blocks linked together with some interconnect, but of course another important … Read More
Intel to Buy Altera?
You may already have heard today’s big news in the semiconductor fabless ecosystem that Intel is apparently in talks to buy Altera. I embarrassed myself predicting that Samsung were in talks to buy Freescale (which, of course, they might have been but NXP won that particular race). But this time it is definite enough that … Read More
Full-chip Multi-domain ESD Verification
ESD stands for electro-static discharge and deals with the fact that chips have to survive in an electrically hostile environment: people, testers, assembly equipment, shipping tubes. All of these can carry electric charge that has the “potential” (ho-ho) to damage the chip irreversibly. Historically this was… Read More
25 Years of SNUG; 50 Years of Moore’s Law
Earlier this week it was the Synopsys user group meeting SNUG. Not just any old SNUG but the 25th Annual SNUG. The first one was 15th March 1991 and was attended by 100 people. At the time, Synopsys had annual revenues of $22M. This year, the various SNUGs around the world will have a total attendance of 10,000 people and Synopsys revenue… Read More
TSMC 2015 Technology Symposium
This year’s North American TSMC Technology Symposium is fast approaching. There are three, starting in Silicon Valley.
- San Jose on Tuesday April 7th at the San Jose Convention Center
- Boston on Tuesday April 14th at the Burlington Marriott
- Austin on Thursday April 16th at the downtown Hilton
The symposium will also take … Read More
A Brief History of Kilopass
Kilopass was founded back in 2001 by Jack Peng, whose background was in FPGAs with his most recent position being manager of technology development at Actel (now part of Microsemi). The idea was to build a company making one-time-programmable (OTP) memories using anti-fuse technology. Fuses in home-wiring (OK, I know, we all … Read More
Rethinking Multipatterning for 2nm Node