In a world where Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) and Application Specific Standard Products (ASSPs) are dominating every conceivable application, greater attention is being applied to their long term reliability. These chips are being built on smaller lithographies, running at higher speeds, dissipating… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
DAC: March Update
DAC is coming up. It is already March. If you are in the EDA industry then it is basically three months away, which sounds a lot until you actually have to get everything pulled together so that your booth is ready to go on Monday June 7[SUP]th[/SUP]. Exhibit hours have been extended and now run from 10am to 7pm (only until 6pm on Wednesday).… Read More
3D-IC: Embedded Passives
IEDM 2014 was held in the second week of December 2014 in San Francisco. The excitement is over now and the dust has settled. Last week, at my leisure, I was glancing through the conference proceedings and short course material from IEDM 2014, when a slide from the 3DIC short course caught my attention. The slide presented below gives… Read More
STMicro to Showcase Turnkey NFC Design at MWC
Near-field communication (NFC) technology is finally realizing its potential, thanks to the impetus provided by Apple Pay, and it’s becoming evident from the pre-Mobile World Congress (MWC) buzz coming from several makers of chips, smartphones and wearable devices.
Among the companies displaying NFC products at the 2015 … Read More
Faster ECOs Using Formal Analysis
Your latest SoC has just begun the tape-out process and then marketing comes back with a small update to the specification to make your design more competitive, or maybe your regression tests just found a minor bug in a single IP block that needs to be fixed. Should you go back in your design flow, change the RTL source code and then completely… Read More
Mentor 2014 Results
Yesterday Mentor announced their quarterly results. Since their financial year is not aligned with the calendar year, this was also the end of their fiscal 2015. The quarter was an all-time record with revenues of $439M and (non-GAAP) EPS of $1.09. The year was also an all-time record with revenues of $1.24B and EPS of $1.77. Half… Read More
Atmel’s new car MCU tips imminent SoC journey
The automotive industry has reached a new era marked by giant initiatives like infotainment, connected car and semi-autonomous vehicles. And no one seems more excited than the MCU guys who have been a part and parcel of in-car electronics for the past two decades. However, the humble microcontroller is going through a profound… Read More
Got FPGA Timing Closure Problems?
I had a meeting with Harn Hua Ng, the CEO of Plunify, a couple of weeks ago. They are an EDA company that I’d never heard of. Partially that is because they only play in the FPGA space, a country I visit less frequently than SoC land. Plus, they are based in Singapore, a country I have only been to a couple of times in my life.
Plunify… Read More
Who Leads Semiconductor Innovation?
Semiconductor business is highly dependent on technology and that changes very rapidly in the semiconductor space. It’s important to recognize the importance of research and innovation activities in this space. In my last article on 7nm technology node, one respondent commented, very rightly, “It’s important to have competition… Read More
Vietnam: Rising Star in Electronics
I recently returned from a trip to Southeast Asia, including Vietnam. The trip was for pleasure, not business, but I could not help but notice the boom in economic activity. The coastal cities of Hai Phong, Da Nang and NHA Trang were trying to outdo each other in building hotels, bridges and amusement parks – largely to cater to foreign… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption