FD-SOI Better Than FinFET?

FD-SOI Better Than FinFET?
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2014 at 9:16 am

As I said earlier in the month, I was going to be talking about FD-SOI at the Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) in Monterey. I am not especially an expert on FD-SOI but I know enough to be dangerous and given that we were already talking about FinFET and 3D/2.5D chips, it fitted in nicely.

The 10,000 foot view is that FD-SOI has… Read More


System Design: Turtles All the Way Down

System Design: Turtles All the Way Down
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2014 at 7:34 am

According to Steven Hawking, Bertrand Russell once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun orbits around our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported… Read More


ARM Results, Strong Biceps

ARM Results, Strong Biceps
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2014 at 10:53 am

ARM announced their Q1 results yesterday. Having just written that Intel lost $1B in mobile, I guess I could have used the title “ARM didn’t lose $1B in mobile.” They made $100M (on revenues of $300M). So let’s start off with what their results actually were and then look at what other things of interest … Read More


IP the eSilicon Way

IP the eSilicon Way
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2014 at 9:51 pm

Pop quiz: eSilicon has a big IP development group in what Asian country? If you didn’t know and you guessed, you probably got it wrong with China or India. It is Vietnam. In fact they have two sites. One in Ho Chi Minh City (that used to be called Saigon) and one in Da Nang.

At Electronic Design Process Symposium (EDPS) held last … Read More


On-chip Firewall

On-chip Firewall
by Paul McLellan on 04-22-2014 at 8:00 am

We have had the Snowden revelations that the NSA has gone rogue, Target lost a zillion credit cards, the Heartbleed bug meaning that main security protocol of the internet had been coded up wrong for a couple of years, theft of records from RSA and more. One result is that people do not completely trust a security system that depends… Read More


Cadence Acquires Jasper

Cadence Acquires Jasper
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2014 at 4:06 pm

Cadence announced today that it is acquiring Jasper Design Automation for $170M in an all-cash offer. Jasper has $24M in cash so it is really an acquisition for around $145M. i think that is around 4X revenue but I only know rumors about Jasper’s revenue numbers.

All the big 3 already have their own formal technology but the … Read More


GlobalFoundries Gets a 14nm Process

GlobalFoundries Gets a 14nm Process
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2014 at 10:00 am

I went to a briefing last Tuesday where Samsung and GlobalFoundries announced that they have the same process at 14nm. Dan already wrote about itso it is old news in one sense. But I really think people underestimate its importance. In essence, reading between the lines, Samsung is licensing GF their 14nm process. This is driven … Read More


Can the NSA Get Into Your Chip?

Can the NSA Get Into Your Chip?
by Paul McLellan on 04-21-2014 at 2:49 am

At DVCon Lawrence Loh and Viktor Markus Purri gave a tutorial on Formally Verifying Security Aspects of SoC Designs. Lawrence is the direector of WW application engineering and Markus is an FAE who specializes in security verification.

I’m not going to attempt to summarize an entire half-day tutorial in under 1000 words,… Read More


Maker Faire San Mateo

Maker Faire San Mateo
by Paul McLellan on 04-20-2014 at 9:30 pm

A few years ago my then-girlfriend was an artist and she had some friends who were in the maker movement, one who ran a tool “lending library” and so on. So she wanted to go to the Maker Faire, which is a huge event held in San Mateo exhibit center. In those days it was more like an outgrowth of burning man but there were already… Read More


International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis

International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis
by Paul McLellan on 04-20-2014 at 12:54 am

There are always a number of other events that are colocated with DAC. One this year is the 23rd International Workshop on Logic and Synthesis (IWLS) that is held the weekend before DAC on May 30th and June 1st. Strictly speaking it is not colocated since it is in the Galleria Park Hotel on Sutter Street a few blocks away whereas DAC itself… Read More