Advanced IC technologies, 5nm and 7nm FinFET design and stacked packaging, are enabling massive levels of integration of super-fast circuits. These in turn enable much of the exciting new technology we hear so much about: mobile gaming and ultra-high definition mobile video through enhanced mobile broadband in 5G, which requires… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Computing with Light
I recently wrote about this year’s Cadence Photonics Summit. As I mentioned in that post, it was a fascinating event with several companies providing useful and informative presentations. You can access some of the presentations on the event site. One presentation, given by Jose Capmany of iPronics, was especially interesting… Read More
Avoiding Fines for Semiconductor IP Leakage
In my semiconductor and EDA travels I’ve enjoyed visiting engineers across the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. I’ll never forget on one trip to South Korea where I was visiting a semiconductor company and upon reaching the lobby a security officer asked me to take out my laptop computer, because he wanted me to… Read More
Debugging Hardware Designs Using Software Capabilities
Every few months, I touch base with Cristian Amitroaie, CEO of AMIQ EDA, to learn more about how AMIQ is helping hardware design and verification engineers be more productive. Quite often, his answers surprise me. When he started describing their Design and Verification Tools (DVT) Eclipse Integrated Development Environment… Read More
Full Solution for eMRAM Coming in 2020
It’s amazing to think that Apollo moon mission used computers that were based on magnetic core memories. Of course, CMOS memories superseded them rapidly. However, over the decades since, memory technologies have advanced significantly, in terms of density, power and new types of technologies, e.g NAND Flash. Ever since the… Read More
Ultra-Short Reach PHY IP Optimized for Advanced Packaging Technology
Frequent Semiwiki readers are no doubt familiar with the rapid advances in 2.5D heterogeneous multi-die packaging technology. A relatively well-established product sector utilizing this technology is the 2.5D integration of logic die with a high-bandwidth memory (HBM) DRAM die stack on a silicon interposer; the interposer… Read More
A VIP to Accelerate Verification for Hyperscalar Caching
Non-volatile memory (NVM) is finding new roles in datacenters, not currently so much in “cold storage” as a replacement for hard disk drives, but definitely in “warm storage”. Warm storage applications target an increasing number of functions requiring access to databases with much lower latency than is possible through paths… Read More
Cadence Continues Photonics Industry Engagement
On November 13, Cadence held its annual Photonics Summit. Cadence has been hosting this event for several years with the intention of advancing the photonics industry. With this event, Cadence has been a catalyst in furthering photonic product development. It’s quite remarkable that Cadence hosts such an event in a field where… Read More
Another Smart EDA Merger Adds RF Tools
Mergers and acquisitions are just a fact of modern business life, so the semiconductor, IP and EDA industries all can benefit, but only when the two companies have complementary products with some actual synergy. Cadence acquired OrCAD back in 1999, adding a Windows-based PCB tool to their product lineup, and here in 2019 some … Read More
The First Must-Have in 5G
If I was asked about must-have needs for 5G, I’d probably talk about massive MIMO and a lot of exotic parallel DSP processing, also perhaps need for new intelligent approaches to link adaptation and intelligent network slicing in the infrastructure. But there’s something that comes before that all that digital cleverness, in … Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki