My new iPad lasts about 10 hours on a single charge and the A5X processor is designed with a 45nm process from Samsung. Processor chips for tablets like this use a multi-voltage IC design flow to reduce total power by:… Read More
Electronic Design Automation
Advanced Node Design Webinar Series
At advanced process nodes, variation and its effects on the design become a huge challenge. Join Cadence® Virtuoso® experts for a series of technical webinars on variation-aware design. Learn how to use advanced technologies and tools to analyze and understand the affects of variation. We’ll introduce you to the latest Virtuoso… Read More
Silicon-Accurate Mixed-Signal Fractional-N PLL IP Design Paper
Silicon Creations will be presenting a paper with Berkeley Design Automation at the TSMC Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum next week where TSMC’s design ecosystem member companies and customers share real-case solutions for design challenges within TSMC’s design ecosystem:
This presentation will describe … Read More
Altera’s Use of Virtual Platforms
Altera have been making use of Synopsys’s virtual platform technology to accelerate the time to volume by letting software development proceed in parallel with semiconductor development so that the software development does not need to wait until availability of hardware.
In the past, creating the virtual platform … Read More
Challenges in Managing Power Consumption of Mobile SoC Chipsets: And What Lies Ahead When Your Hand-Held Is Your Compute Device!
Qualcomm VP of Engineering, Charlie Matar, will be keynoting the Apache/ANSYS seminar in Santa Clara next Thursday. Charlie is a great guy and a great speaker so you won’t want to miss this and it’s FREE! I spoke to Charlie, he will be speaking on:
Today’s complex SOC design is driven by the constant demand for high performance… Read More
ICCAD: 30 years
ICCAD is November 5th to 8th in the Hilton San Jose (downtown).
It is very off topic, but if you are British then November 5th is the rough equivalent of July 4th when there are fireworks displays all over the country. Britain is one of very few countries that transitioned from some sort of autocracy to a democracy without having a revolution.… Read More
Soft IP Quality Standards
As SoC design has transformed from being about writing RTL and more towards IP assembly, the issue of IP quality has become increasingly important. In 2011 TSMC and Atrenta launched the soft IP qualification program. Since then, 13 partners have joined the program.
IP quality is multi-faceted but at the most basic level, an IP block… Read More
Designing with FinFETs
Intel is the number one semiconductor company in the world and has taken the lead in bringing FinFET (aka Tri-Gate) silicon to market at the 22nm node starting in May 2011, so now we see the pure play foundries playing catch-up and start talking about their own FinFET roadmaps. IC designers and layout engineers want to know how their… Read More
Silicon Correlation, Not EDA Marketing Sparkles!
It’s all about the silicon. It’s all about silicon correlation. TSMC Open Integration Platform should be renamed TSMC Silicon Correlation Platform or TSMC SCP. One of the problems I have with EDA technical papers today is that they are not silicon based. Anybody can put up slides with marketing sparkles on them but if you want qualified… Read More
Apache Dimensions of Electronic Design Seminars
Coming up are ANSYS/Apache seminars on Dimensions of Electronic Design. Watch the video where Arvind Shanmugavel gives some details about why you should attend. Probably most readers are in Silicon Valley, and the seminar here is on 18th at the Hyatt (next to Santa Clara convention center).
The seminars are free to qualified attendees.… Read More
Stochastic Pupil Fill in EUV Lithography