Battle of the Patents

Battle of the Patents
by Paul McLellan on 09-27-2011 at 5:01 pm

What’s going on in all these wireless patent battles? And why?

The first thing to understand is that implementing most (all?) wireless standards involves infringing on certain “essential patents.” The word “essential” means that if you meet the standard, you infringe the patent, there is no way around it. You can’t build a CDMA… Read More


Magma eSilicon One Keynote

Magma eSilicon One Keynote
by Paul McLellan on 09-27-2011 at 2:31 pm

I was at the first half of Magma’s Silicon One event yesterday. The first keynote was by Rajeev about the environment for SoC designs, especially fabless startups, and Magma’s role going forward. More about that later. The other keynote was Jack Harding, CEO of eSilicon. As usual Jack did his presentation without … Read More


Apple’s Supply Chain

Apple’s Supply Chain
by Paul McLellan on 09-21-2011 at 5:48 pm

I am doing some consulting right now for a company that shall remain nameless, and one of the things I have had to look at is Apple’s supply chain. I came across an interesting article by someone with the goal to “buy a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple.” He is in the UK and doesn’t like Apple’s… Read More


Custom Signal Planning Methodologies

Custom Signal Planning Methodologies
by Paul McLellan on 09-20-2011 at 4:08 pm

It is no secret that custom ICs are getting larger and more complex and this has driven chip design teams to split up into smaller teams to handle the manual or semi-automated routing of the many blocks and hierarchical layers that go to make up such a design. These sub-teams don’t just need to handle the routing within their own block(s)… Read More


Analog Constraint Standards

Analog Constraint Standards
by Paul McLellan on 09-20-2011 at 8:00 am

Over the years there has been a lot of standard creation in the IC design world to allow interoperability of tools from different vendors. One area of recent interest is interoperable constraints for custom IC design. Increasingly, analog design layout is becoming more automated. Advanced process nodes require trial layouts… Read More


Coby Hanoch joins Jasper

Coby Hanoch joins Jasper
by Paul McLellan on 09-20-2011 at 7:00 am

Jasper has hired Coby Hanoch as the VP of international sales to manage sales outside of North America. I talked to him last week.

Coby started his career after graduation from the Israeli Institute of Technology as an engineer at National Semiconductor. He quickly ended up in verification where they developed the first random … Read More


Fast Track Seminars

Fast Track Seminars
by Paul McLellan on 09-15-2011 at 6:11 pm


Atrenta’s SoC realization seminars, “Fast Track Your SoC Design” have started.The first one was in Ottowa last Tuesday, and it was a full house. In a straw poll, most of the attendees acknowledged facing IP handoff and quality issues. The keynote speaker was Dr Yuejian Wu, director of ASIC development at Infinera… Read More


Phil Bishop and marketing at Magma

Phil Bishop and marketing at Magma
by Paul McLellan on 09-15-2011 at 4:59 pm

Earlier in the week I met with Phil Bishop, who is the corporate VP of worldwide marketing at Magma.

I started by asking him where he came from. He originally started as a designer at Motorola in microprocessors and microcontrollers. Then he moved to Silicon Compiler Systems (remember them?) who ended up being acquired by Mentor.… Read More


Cadence ClosedAccess

Cadence ClosedAccess
by Paul McLellan on 09-11-2011 at 4:00 pm

There are various rumors around about Cadence starting to close up stuff that has been open for a long time. Way back in the midst of time, as part of the acquisition of CCT, the Federal Trade Commission forced Cadence to open up LEF/DEF and allow interoperability of Cadence tools (actually only place and route) I believe for 10 years.… Read More


2.5D and 3D designs

2.5D and 3D designs
by Paul McLellan on 09-07-2011 at 1:54 pm

Going up! Power and performance issues, along with manufacturing yield issues, limit how much bigger chips can get in two dimensions. That, and the fact that you can’t manufacture two different processes on the same wafer, mean that we are going up into the third dimension.

The simplest way is what is called package-in-package… Read More