All Things Semiconductor!
There were quite a few announcements at the Samsung Foundry Forum but my favorite was the IP partnership between Samsung and Silvaco. IP is a critical part of the fabless ecosystem and one of the advantages an IDM foundry has over a pure-play is the vast amounts of internal IP that have been silicon proven over the years. With Samsung… Read More
It used to be that at the mention of libraries, people would think of foundry PDK deliverables. However, now a host of factors such as automotive thermal requirements, nanometer FinFET processes, near threshold voltages, higher clock rates, high volumes, etc., have dramatically changed library development. These factors … Read More
As you may know, Silvaco has done some very clever acquisitions to fuel their unprecedented growth over the last five years. We have a wiki that tracks EDA Mergers and Acquisitions, Silvaco included, and it is the most viewed wiki on SemiWiki.com with 102,005 views thus far.
Silvaco acquired Nangate in March of 2018. NanGate got … Read More
Silvaco was founded the same year I entered the EDA industry (1984) fresh from University. I first met them at the Design Automation Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and have been an active observer of their growth ever since. In fact, Silvaco is now the largest privately held EDA company and is growing at a rapid pace. In 2014… Read More
I started out my engineering career by doing transistor-level circuit design and we used a proprietary SPICE circuit simulator. One thing that I quickly realized was that the accuracy of my circuit simulations depended entirely on the model files and parasitics. Here we are 40 years later and the accuracy of SPICE circuit simulations… Read More
The user group events held by EDA companies offer a unique opportunity to hear from designers and CAD engineers who are actually using the EDA tools “in the trenches”. Some user presentations are pretty straightforward – e.g., providing a quality-of-results (QoR) design comparison when invoking a new tool feature added to a recent… Read More
Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
Tom Dillinger and I attended the Silvaco SURGE 2018 event in Silicon Valley last week with several hundred of our semiconductor brethren. Tom has a couple blogs ready to go but first let’s talk about the keynote by Silvaco CEO David Dutton. David isn’t your average EDA CEO, he spent the first 8 years of his career at Intel then spent … Read More
The semiconductor industry has been very good to me over the past 35 years. I have had a front row seat to some of the most innovative and disruptive things like the fabless transformation and of course the Electronic Design Automation phenomenon, not to mention the end products that we as an industry have enabled. It is truly amazing… Read More
Standard cell library developers are faced with a daunting task when it is time to create a library for a new process node. Porting an existing library can be a big help, but even then, manual modifications to 800 or more cells is still required. Each of those cells has many geometric elements are that affected by new design rules. All… Read More
