In the 1990’s, designing for performance was the main challenge and the marketing message for Intel processors was limited to the core frequency. Then designers had to optimize power consumption to target mobile phones/smartphone and build power efficient SoC, low power but high performance devices. Now in 2015 the semi industry… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Globalfoundries 22FDX Technology Shows Advantages in PPA over 28nm Node
I really enjoy ARM Techcon when it rolls around every year because it has such a wide range of topics and exhibits. You can find maker gadgets, IoT information, small boards for industrial control, software development kits, semiconductor IP vendors as well as the big EDA players and foundries. This year after perusing the exhibit… Read More
Breaking the Limits of SoC Prototyping
Earlier this month during my conversation with Dr. Walden C. Rhines, he emphasised the need for our next generation designers to think at system level and design everything keeping the system’s view in mind. The verification will go through major transformation at the system level. I can see the FPGA prototyping systems already… Read More
The EDAC Wally Rhines Roast (video)
Last week was the EDAC Phil Kaufman award dinner. It was much more like a roast, probably because Wally has a great sense of humor and as Aart de Geus said, “Wally is a cool cat to have a beer with…” Aart is right of course, hanging with Wally is one of my favorite work things to do.
The place was lousy with media people so I will try and add some… Read More
Maybe Clockless Chip Design’s Time has Come
There have always been novel technologies vying to compete with conventional design practices. It is hit or miss on the success of these ideas. In the 90’s I recall speaking to someone who was convinced that they could effectively build computers based on multilevel logic. This, as we know did not pan out. But there have been many … Read More
A (R)evolution in Hardware-based Simulation Acceleration
The most exciting products in our industry are those that are both evolutionary and revolutionary. Cadence has just announced an update to their hardware simulation acceleration platform – Palladium Z1 – which continues the evolution of the unique capabilities of processor-based acceleration, plus a revolutionary approach… Read More
A Novel Microprocessor Fighting Dark Silicon, Energy Efficiency, Code density and Silicon area
Processor cores used in computers and smartphones have become impaired by their own complexity and can’t fully utilize future CMOS generations for increasing their efficiency. Due to the continued increase of density and speed of transistors, these big cores produce too much heat per mm[SUP]2[/SUP] if trying to follow Moore’s… Read More
Merger Mania: The Future of the Semiconductor Industry
In a semiconductor industry which appears maturing, we are also seeing the technologies unravelling newer transistor structures, memories, processors, and newer ways of designing ICs and electronic systems. The present decade appears to be at the cusp of a new transformation in the semiconductor industry. Amid a slew of mergers… Read More
HiSilicon’s Experience with Synopsys ICC2
At TSMC’s OIP Symposium last month, Zhe (Jared) Lui of HiSilicon presented their experiences with Synopsys’ ICC2 physical design suite.
Jared started by giving an overview of Huawei and HiSilicon. HiSilicon is the semiconductor arm of Huawei. I assume everyone knows who Huawei is. To a first approximation they … Read More
Verification with Tcl for what? – part 2
In Orion Bytes we use Tcl both for the internal research, product and different verification services. We use also SystemVerilog UVM and Python based Cocotb for different approaches. I think it’s no need to deep into the SystemVerilog and UVM principles here – today’s main verification fashion is well described through… Read More


A Century of Miracles: From the FET’s Inception to the Horizons Ahead