If you follow technology news, it would be hard to deny that we live in exciting times. In some ways there is an unparalleled amount of big and cool technology development going on right now. We all have followed the rise of Tesla Motors. They took over a long vacant US big-auto plant in Fremont and are reinventing the US automobile industry.… Read More
Author: Tom Simon
Intel and the Intel-of-Things
When I joined Calma in 1982, Intel was a small company making microprocessor chips in a crowded marketplace. They had scored big with IBM who was using their 8088 in the very first personal computer. Wind River was a hatchling with David Wilner and Jerry Fiddler working out of a rented warehouse in Berkeley – I know, I hung out… Read More
Full Spectrum Analog FastSPICE Useful for RF Designs on Bulk CMOS
It has been about a year since the acquisition of Berkeley Design Automation by Mentor Graphics. Berkeley was doing quite well in the somewhat crowded SPICE simulator market. In many respects they broke new ground for high speed and accurate SPICE simulators. Since the acquisition we know that former Berkeley executives are now… Read More
Mapping Focus and Dose onto BEOL Fabrication Effects
With today’s ArF based lithography using 193nm wavelength light, we are hard up against the limitations imposed by the Raleigh equation. Numerous clever things have been devised to maximize yield and reduce feature size. These include 2 beam lithography, multiple patterning, immersion litho processes to improve NA, thinner… Read More
Cadence’s New Implementation System Promises Better TAT and PPA
On Tuesday Cadence made a big announcement about their new physical implementation offering, Innovus, during the keynote address at the CDNLive event in Silicon Valley. Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan alluded to it during his kick off talk, and next up Anirudh Devgan, Senior Vice President, Digital & Signoff Group, filled in more … Read More
On-Chip Power Integrity Analysis Moves to the Package
Power regimes for contemporary SOC’s now include a large number of voltage domains. Rail voltages are matched closely to the performance and power requirements of various portions of the design. Indeed, some of the supply voltages are so low that the noise margins in these domains is exceedingly low. Higher voltage domains are… Read More
IoT Sensor Node Designs Call for Highly Integrated Flows
Applications for IoT sensors are becoming more sophisticated, especially for industrial usage. Building optimal sensors for different applications requires multi-domain design, optimization and verification flows. The sensor devices are usually MEMS, and as such have electrical properties that need to be tailored to … Read More
MEMS Require 3D Field Solver for Accurate Cap Values
MEMS devices have become extremely important and common. Freescale last year reported its combined MEMS shipments exceeded 2 billion units. If we just examine how many accelerometers we each probably own today, it is easy to see why the market for these products is growing so rapidly. The first and most obvious device is our cell… Read More
How Well is HSPICE Tracking Current Design Trends?
For about 5 years now Synopsys has held an HSPICE SIG event in conjunction with DesignCon. It features a small vendor faire with companies that partner with Synopsys on HSPICE flows. They also have a dinner with industry/customer speakers and provide an update on HSPICE development. Lastly there is a Q&A where customers get… Read More
OpenHAB Aims to Bring Open Source and Local Control to IoT?
The predominant model for IoT sensor data flow is for data collection on the device and data storage, analysis and access in the cloud. By cloud, I mean that particular vendor’s servers. This is true for Fitbit, Nest, Dropcam,Trace Snow (my favorite skiing app), Smart Things, etc. If you look up IBM’s presumptuously named Internet… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay