Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler

Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 03-04-2014 at 8:00 am

Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More


ARM Lab in a Box

ARM Lab in a Box
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2014 at 5:57 pm

St. Francis Xavier said “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” ARM is not going for them quite that young but this week they announced their “lab in a box” for participating universities worldwide. It is actually a joint launch between the ARM University Program (which is not new)… Read More


Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers

Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2014 at 4:59 pm

Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More


Gobi, the Jewel in Qualcomm’s Crown

Gobi, the Jewel in Qualcomm’s Crown
by Paul McLellan on 03-01-2014 at 5:19 pm

Back in the 1990s in the middle of the 2G GSM era, cell-phone manufacturers would display a “triangle of difficulty” with a large base labeled radio, a middle smaller part labeled baseband and a little triangle on top labelled software. The idea was that the radio was incredibly difficult, then the baseband chip and… Read More


GlobalFoundries Fab 8: Jobs

GlobalFoundries Fab 8: Jobs
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 4:26 pm

GlobalFoundries was created by spinning out the manufacturing side of AMD’s semiconductor business. Initially the company was jointly owned by AMD and by the Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) which is an investment arm of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. A couple of years ago ATIC bought out the remaining share from… Read More


Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3

Synopsys’s Next Generation Emulator, ZeBu Server-3
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 12:17 pm

Since Synopsys acquired Eve over a year ago, they haven’t announced anything new in the ZeBu product line. Emulators are not like software where you expect incremental releases a couple of times per year, each new “release” is a complete re-design using new hardware fabric in a new process technology. Earlier… Read More


Friday Miscellany: EDAC Mixer, DVCon, DVCon Europe

Friday Miscellany: EDAC Mixer, DVCon, DVCon Europe
by Paul McLellan on 02-28-2014 at 8:31 am

Yesterday evening was EDAC’s first mixer. I assume the first of a regular event. It was held in Mountain View in the old train station which is now the Savvy Cellar wine bar. I had a nice glass of rosé from Provence that reminded me of the years that I lived in the south of France. Some of the money we spent went to charity, to the Mountain… Read More


Getting an MPW Quote on My iPhone

Getting an MPW Quote on My iPhone
by Paul McLellan on 02-25-2014 at 12:00 pm

As I blogged about recently, eSilicon have completely automated the quote process for their MPW shuttle service. You can use an online interface that runs in the browser but there is also an app that you can download from the App Store.

So I decided I had a few million dollars to burn and I’d get myself my very own TSMC 20nm parts.… Read More


SEMICON China Shanghai 上海

SEMICON China Shanghai 上海
by Paul McLellan on 02-23-2014 at 10:30 am

SEMICON is not just the event in San Francisco every July, there are other SEMICONs around the world. Coming up next, Shanghai China. In fact there are four colocated events:

  • SEMICON China 2014, March 18th-20th
  • The 8th PV fab managers’ forum, March 17th-18th (all things PhotoVoltaic)
  • FPD China 2014, March 18th-20th (all
Read More

ISSCC: Analog-Digital Converter in FD-SOI

ISSCC: Analog-Digital Converter in FD-SOI
by Paul McLellan on 02-20-2014 at 11:50 am

The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) was last week in San Francisco. Stéphane Le Tual, Pratap Narayan Singh, Christophe Curis, Pierre Dautriche, all from STMicroelectronics presented a paper on A 20GHz-BW 6b 10GS/s 32mW Time-Interleaved SAR ADC with Master T&H in 28nm UTBB FDSOI TechnologyRead More