PCI Express 3.0 increased the supported data rate to 8 Gbps, which effectively doubles the data rate supported by PCI Express 2.0. While the data rate was increased, no improvement was made to the channels. As such, an 8 Gbps channel in PCIe 3.0 experiences significantly more loss than one implemented in PCIe 2.0. To compensate for… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
First Time, Every Time
While this iconic advertising phrase was first used to describe the ink reliability of a ballpoint pen, it perfectly summarizes the average consumer’s attitude toward automobile reliability as well. We don’t really care how it’s done, as long as everything in our car works first time, every time. Even when that includes heated… Read More
Double Patterning for IC Design, Extraction and Signoff
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
What did CES 2013 mean for #SemiEDA?
CES is the preeminent gadget show, and in the LVCC South Hall a wave has been building for some time. It’s now the place where chipsets are introduced, and this year saw a wide range of introductions from Atmel, Bosch, Broadcom, Intel (OK, they’re still in Central Hall), InvenSense, Marvell, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, ST-Ericsson,… Read More
Yawn… New EDA Leader Results Are Coming
We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.
Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More
Oasys Has a New CEO
Scott Seaton is the new CEO of Oasys Design Systems. Paul van Besouw, the CEO since the company’s founding, becomes the CTO. I met Scott last year when I was doing some consulting work for Carbon Design where he was VP of sales (the new VP sales at Carbon is Hal Conklin, by the way).
I talked to Scott about why he had joined Oasys. … Read More
Buying DDRn Controller IP AND Memory Model to the same IP vendor gives real TTM advantage
We all know the concept of “one stop shop”, becoming popular in the Design IP market. The topic we will address today is NOT the “one stop shop”, even if it looks similar, but rather that we could call “consistent design flow”.
What does that means? Simply that, if your SoC design is integrating a DDRn (LPDDR2, DDR3 or even DDR4, let’s… Read More
Fixing Double-patterning Errors at 20nm
David Avercrombie of Mentor won the award for the best tutorial at the 2012 TSMC OIP for his presentation, along with Peter Hsu of TSMC, on Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in 20nm. The whole presentation along with the slides is now available online here. The first part of the presentation is an introduction to double … Read More
Mentor @ the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Forum
At TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor made technical presentations on four different topics, two of them co-presented with TSMC and LSI Corporation. Those presentations are described below with links to downloadable pdf presentation files.
Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in… Read More
A Brief History of Apache Design
Apache Design Solutions was founded in 2001 by Andrew Yang and three researchers from HP Labs (Norman Chang, Shen Lin, Weize Xie). They realized that engineers striving to meet the goal of increased device miniaturization, as defined by Moore’s Law, would eventually hit stumbling blocks in their progress. The founding team believed… Read More
Why NA is Not Relevant to Resolution in EUV Lithography