DAC starts on Sunday. If you are in San Francisco on Sunday then the first event is the normal welcome reception. This is the ultimate networking event in EDA. It is in the Intercontinental Hotel about a block from the convention center and runs from 5.30 to 7pm. This is preceded by Gary Smith’s traditional kickoff from 5pm to… Read More
Author: Paul McLellan
TSMC: Keynote, OIP, 20nm, 16nm, panels, and more #51DAC
What is TSMC doing at DAC?
The biggest event is presumably Cliff Hou’s DAC keynote on Monday at 3.25pm Industry Opportunities in the Sub-10nm Era. And he also wrote the foreword to Fabless, the book that Dan Nenni and I have written and where you can get a signed copy on Tuesday evening at the reception.
There is an IP workshop … Read More
Samsung Voice of the Body
I just back from Samsung’s big announcement held at the SFJazz center (very conveniently 15 minutes walk from my place). They put a stake in the ground about their program at the intersection of medicine and health and technology. They had said in advance that they would not announce any new hardware but in fact they did…although… Read More
The Chip Design Game at the End of Moore’s Law
I just came across and interesting video from last year’s Hot Chips conference. Dr. Robert Colwell of DARPA discusses how the processor design industry is likely to change after it becomes too difficult to continue scaling transistors to ever-smaller dimensions. This is likely to occur sometime within the next decade,… Read More
SEMICON West 2014 Preview
There is a really big conference coming up in San Francisco…no, not DAC although of course that is coming up too. I’m talking about SEMICON West which is much bigger, filling all 3 Moscone exhibit halls. It is July 8-10th. It is, of course, the semiconductor equipment industry (and solar) show.
The opening keynote on… Read More
Mark Milligan Joins Calypto. Plus Google at DAC
I talked to Mark Milligan this morning, who has just joined Calypto as VP Marketing. I first met Mark back when he was at CoWare and I was at VaST or maybe it was Virtutech. Then he moved on and ran marketing at SpringSoft which, I’m sure you remember, Synopsys acquired. I asked him what encouraged him to join Calypto.
He said that… Read More
Dark Silicon
One of the problems with chips today is that of so-called “dark silicon”. We can put massive functionality on an SoC today. A billion transistors, and that is just at 28nm. But power constraints (both leakage and dynamic power) limit how much of the chip can be powered up at any one time. In some cases this is not that big… Read More
The Silicon ATM
One of the things that eSilicon does is handle all the backend operations for the designs that they do. eSilicon is a fabless ASIC company and so the most visible part of the business is the design (not to mention IP which is a critical input into design these days). But another key part is arranging with foundries like TSMC to get the … Read More
GlobalFoundries Gets a New Manager in NY
GlobalFoundries is on the move. Of course the biggest announcement recently was the licensing of Samsung’s process to run in fab 8 in Malta, New York. This means that fab 8 will be a viable alternative, a true second source for Samsung production and one that doesn’t compete with its customers as Samsung does in many … Read More
EUV Will Never Happen
I had lunch today with a guy who has to remain nameless. But he is on the edge of the semiconductor lithography thing. He told me EUV will never happen. Of course lots of people have said that. Me for one. But he said everyone knows it. The investment community, the foundries, everyone. Intel put money into ASML in the hopes that it would… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing