Heard on the Street at ITF

Heard on the Street at ITF
by Paul McLellan on 06-25-2015 at 7:00 pm

As I said yesterday, I’m at the imec Technology Forum (ITF) in Brussels. So what have I learned from all the people that I’ve interacted with.

There were two press releases announced at a press conference yesterday. The first was that imec was expanding its relationship with Toshiba and Sandisk. This covers bringing… Read More


Samsung: the Journey to 14nm and 10nm

Samsung: the Journey to 14nm and 10nm
by Paul McLellan on 06-24-2015 at 7:00 pm

At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More


Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More

Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More
by Paul McLellan on 06-24-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week I sat down and talked to Bijan Kiani of Synopsys. He has marketing responsibility for design implementation products at Synopsys spanning digital, custom and analog mixed signal (AMS).

He was born in Iran and after high school he moved to the UK. He got his PhD degree from University of Edinburgh. It turns out that I was doing… Read More


EUV: the view from imec

EUV: the view from imec
by Paul McLellan on 06-23-2015 at 7:00 pm

I’m at the 2015 imec technology forum (ITF) in Brussels the next few days. One of the presentations today was by Peter Wennink, the CEO of ASML. The thing that most interested me in his presentation is what the status of EUV is today. ASML is the only company developing EUV steppers so what they think is important. On the other … Read More


Sonics’ New NoC

Sonics’ New NoC
by Paul McLellan on 06-23-2015 at 7:00 am

Today Sonics announced the latest version of their network-on-chip (NoC) technology, SonicsGN-3.0. As with any new release there are lots of improvements that are of interest mainly to existing users, but the big area with increased capability is the expanded interleaved memory technology (IMT). This was first introduced … Read More


SEMulator3D on Silicon Cloud International

SEMulator3D on Silicon Cloud International
by Paul McLellan on 06-22-2015 at 7:00 am

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote about Silicon Cloud International (SCI). Their mission is to help smaller countries that have targeted semiconductor design as a way to move up the technology ladder from low-cost manufacturing. Last year everything was in the future but SCI now have their first two centers up and running. The first,… Read More


IBM Design Tools in the Cloud: Big News or Old News?

IBM Design Tools in the Cloud: Big News or Old News?
by Paul McLellan on 06-19-2015 at 7:00 am

One announcement that I missed coming up to the Design Automation Conference last week was that SiCAD is hosting a portfolio of IBM’s design automation tools in the cloud. Supposedly these are priced half the cost of similar capability from Cadence, Synopsys and Mentor. So should the big three be worried? Is this an earth-shattering… Read More


Semiconductor Equipment: the Report and the Show

Semiconductor Equipment: the Report and the Show
by Paul McLellan on 06-18-2015 at 7:00 am

Somebody said to me recently that SEMICON West, which takes place in San Francisco July 14-16th, isn’t that big a deal since very little manufacturing goes on in the US any more. In fact 15% of manufacturing capacity is in north america (I think that actually means the US since I don’t think there are any fabs in Canada).… Read More


High Level Synthesis. Are We There Yet?

High Level Synthesis. Are We There Yet?
by Paul McLellan on 06-16-2015 at 7:00 am

High level synthesis (HLS) seems to have been part of the backdrop of design automation for so long that it seems to be one of those things that nobody notices any more. But it has also crept up on people and gone from interesting technology to keep an eye on to getting genuine adoption. The first commercial product in the space was behavioral… Read More


I Don’t Know Much About Aart…

I Don’t Know Much About Aart…
by Paul McLellan on 06-15-2015 at 7:00 am

Actually, like anyone who has been in EDA for more than a decade or two (or three) I know quite a bit about Aart. But I still learned quite a bit about his views at the Fireside Chat at DAC where Ed Sperling talked to Aart for three-quarters of an hour.

Aart has a great talent at taking various small trends in the industry and aggregating … Read More