Next Generation Transistors

Next Generation Transistors
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2012 at 1:54 pm

We have all heard that planar transistors have run out of steam. There are two ways forward. The one that has garnered all the attention is Intel’s trigate which is their name for FinFET. The other is using thin film SoI which ST is doing. TSMC and Global seem to be going the FinFET way too, although at a more leisurely pace. But … Read More


Keeping Moore’s Law Alive

Keeping Moore’s Law Alive
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2012 at 12:37 pm

At the GSA silicon summit yesterday the first keynote was by Subramanian Iyer of IBM on Keeping Moore’s Law Alive. He started off by asking the question “Is Moore’s Law in trouble?” and answered with an equivocal “maybe.”

Like some of the other speakers during the day, he pointed out that … Read More


Kadenz Leben: CDNLive! EMEA

Kadenz Leben: CDNLive! EMEA
by Paul McLellan on 04-27-2012 at 2:01 am

If you are in Europe then the CDNLive! EMEA user conference is in Munich at the Dolce Hotel from May 14th to 16th. Like last month’s CDNLive! in Cadence’s hometown San Jose, the conference focuses on sharing fresh ideas and best practices for all aspects of semiconductor design from embedded software down to bare silicon.… Read More


Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?

Do you need more machines? Licenses? How can you find out?
by Paul McLellan on 04-26-2012 at 9:00 pm

Do you need more servers? Do you need more licenses? If you are kicking off a verification run of 10,000 jobs on 1,000 server cores then you are short of 9000 cores and 9000 licenses, but you’d be insane to rush out with a purchase order just on that basis. Maybe verification isn’t even on the critical path for your design,… Read More


Mentor’s New Emulator

Mentor’s New Emulator
by Paul McLellan on 04-25-2012 at 8:00 am

Mentor announced the latest version of their Veloce emulator at the Globalpress briefing in Santa Cruz. The announcement is in two parts. The first is that they have designed a new custom chip with twice the performance and twice the capacity. It supports up to two billion gate designs and many software engineers. Surprisingly … Read More


Fast buses at DAC

Fast buses at DAC
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 10:05 pm

UPDATE: there is free WiFi on all buses.

OK, these are not the 128 bit 1GHz buses we have to hear about every day. They go roughly 40 miles in roughly an hour. But they take you from Silicon Valley to DAC and back, and they are cheaper than BART or Caltrain.

For the first time this year, DAC has buses from Silicon Valley to Moscone for DAC. … Read More


Audio, not your father’s MP3

Audio, not your father’s MP3
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 9:26 pm

Chris Rowen, Tensilica’s CTO, presented in Santa Cruz at the Globalpress briefing. He was basically presenting Tensilica’s audio strategy, which I’ve written about before. But he provided an interesting perspective. Globalpress (which flies journalists in from all over the world and then fills the few… Read More


Broadcom announces an HFC

Broadcom announces an HFC
by Paul McLellan on 04-24-2012 at 8:00 pm

For a long time Cisco had a very high end product whose official internal name during its years of development was HFR, which stood for Huge F***ing Router (the marketing department insisted it stood for ‘fast’). Eventually it got given a product number, CRS-1, but not before I’d read an article about it in the… Read More


Channel Routing Memories

Channel Routing Memories
by Paul McLellan on 04-23-2012 at 1:12 pm

Back in the early days of ASIC when we had just two and then (wow!) three layers of metal, place and route was done by putting the standard cells in rows with gaps between them and then using a specialized router to do the interconnection. It would use one layer of metal horizontally and one vertically and avoid jogs. This was called a … Read More


The Carbon Decade

The Carbon Decade
by Paul McLellan on 04-19-2012 at 6:00 am

Carbon Design Systems celebrates its 10th anniversary this month. It is a celebration that the company has survived a decade but also bittersweet that the company hasn’t been acquired for a juicy premium. But we just have to accept that EDA is not a business where you can throw together a company in 18 months and sell it for $1B… Read More