Most ICs are fabricated with crystalline silicon (c-Si), which is a tetrahedral structure forming a well-ordered crystal lattice. There’s another form of semiconductor material called amorphous silicon (a-Si) which has no long-range periodic order. It turns out that a-Si is a great material for the active layer in thin-film… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Lucio and the Kaufman Award
Tuesday was the Kaufman award dinner. This year it was awarded to Lucio Lanza. Last week I wrote about how Lucio ended up in EDA, although that was not where he finished up. He is currently a venture capitalist running Lanza Technology Ventures, one of the few VCs to make any investments in the EDA/IP/semiconductor space. Also, unlike… Read More
Semiconductor Safety
Semiconductors and automotive are now like peanut butter and jelly. Certainly you can have one without the other but why would you? I remember when a car first talked to me telling me that the door was ajar. It sounded more like, “the door is a jar” but I got the point. Now my car tells me just about everything including what is wrong with… Read More
In-Design DFM Signoff for 14nm FinFET Designs
While FinFET yield controversy is going on, I see a lot being done to improve that yield by various means. One prime trend today, it must be, it’s worthwhile, is to pull up various signoffs as early as possible during the design cycle. And DFM signoff is a must with respect to yield of fabrication. This reminds me about my patents filed… Read More
Its a bouncing baby IEEE standard!
Pass the cigars! On November 3rd, 2014, the IEEE-SA Standards Board finally approved IEEE P1687 as a new standard. From now on, you can drop the “P” and just call it 1687, or to its friends, IJTAG. Now would be a good time to sign up for an IJTAG technical workshop.
The new IEEE 1687 Internal JTAG (IJTAG) standard is changing… Read More
Improve Test Robustness & Coverage Early in Design
In a semiconductor design, keeping the design testable with high test coverage has always been a requirement. However with shrinking technology nodes and large, dense SoC designs and complex logic structures, while it has become mandatory to reach close to 100% test coverage, it’s extremely difficult to cope with the explosion… Read More
What Presentations to Attend During IP-SoC 2014 ?
Will you go to Grenoble next week to attend to IP-SoC? I will do it and will certainly listen to these Keynote Talks:
- “Platform IP: the next wave for SOCs from IoT to Datacenter” by Tony King-Smith, Executive Vice President, Marketing , Imagination Technologies
- “From Server-class to IoT SoCs: Enabling System
Noise & Reliability of FinFET Designs – Success Stories!
I think by now there has been good level of discussion on FinFET technology at sub-20 nm process nodes and this is an answer to ultra dense, high performance, low power, and billion+ gate SoC designs within the same area. However, it comes with some of the key challenges with respect to power, noise and reliability of the design. A FinFET… Read More
Debugging a 10 bit SAR ADC
SMIC (Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation) is a China-based foundry with technology ranging from 0.35 micron to 28 nm, and we’ve blogged about them before on SemiWiki. I’ve been reading about SMIC recently because they created a technical presentation for the MunEDA Technical Forum Shanghai… Read More
Effective Bug Tracking with IP Sub-systems
Designing an SoC sounds way more exciting than bug tracking, but let’s face it – any bug has the potential to make your silicon fail, so we need to take a serious look at the approaches to bug tracking. When using an IP or an IP subsystem in a design, the SoC integrators require some critical knowledge about this IP. The actual… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing