Listening to a webinar at your desk, in front of a PC screen will never replace a live presentation, but the lesson learned to time spent ratio can be incredibly higher than when traveling to a conference to listen several presentation. If you are interested by the approach taken by a complex DSP design team to overcome the various … Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron
IDM companies like Micronuse SPICE circuit simulators during the design phase in order to predict timing, currents and power on their custom IC chip designs at the transistor level. A senior memory design engineer at Micron named Raed Sabbahtalked today at a webinarabout how the embedded solutions group uses the FineSimcircuit… Read More
What Executives Say About IP Licensing
In the fabless world of semiconductor design, IP components have become indispensable partners and have enabled the development of complex billion gate SoCs. IP business in general is exhibiting a very high growth rate since couple of years and it is going to increase; the same is being reflected by a growing number of IP vendors… Read More
Intel is Still Missing Mobile!
Paul McLellan was on assignment in Hong Kong last week so I attended the Linley Mobile Conference and was not surprised Intel did not present. During the networking sessions I asked more than a dozen people why and the answers were pretty focused on “Intel still does not play well with others” and “Intel’s current mobile offerings… Read More
The Matrix, your ultimate OPC
One of the many consequences of shrinking process nodes is that traditional OPC can no longer achieve good pattern fidelity with reasonable turn-around-time. But there is a solution; we made it ourselves and call it matrix OPC.
First, let’s explore the problems with traditional optical proximity correction (OPC) when applied… Read More
IC Power Noise Reliability for FinFET Designs
Reliability for ICs is a big deal because the last thing that you want to do is ship a new part only to find out later in the field that there are failures not being caught by testing. I’ve already had two consumer products fail this year because of probable reliability issues: My MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM started rebooting caused… Read More
Flexible Integration System for IPs into SoC
The number of IPs with growing complexity and heterogeneity is ever increasing (counting into hundreds) to be integrated into a single SoC. It’s not possible to have them all available at once and in a single repository for the integration engineers to assemble all of them together and integrate into the SoC. The reality is that … Read More
LSI’s Way of Faster & Reliable Electronic System Design
LSI Corporationstarted in 1980s and I had several encounters with it during my jobs in 1990s; not to forget the LSI chips I used to see in desktops and other electronic systems, and I’m happy to see LSI continuing today with more vigour having leadership position in storage and networking space. It provides highly reliable, high … Read More
Hardware/Software Debug
One of the big challenges with modern SoCs is that they have a complex software component as well as the hardware itself being complex. Some aspects of the hardware can be debugged independently of the software and vice versa, but often it is not immediately clear whether the source of a problem is hardware, software or some interaction… Read More
Leveraging Design Team Energy!
Once upon a time, in 1987 to be specific, a French design team was trying to develop a 100% Made in France supercomputer. In fact, not really 100%, as the CPU chips were supposed to be made by Weitek, but we never saw any of these chips, probably too challenging to be designed right first time! Anyway, I was in charge of the design of the … Read More


Intel 18A-P Pushes RibbonFET and Backside Power Beyond the First Generation