Frequent SemiWiki readers are no doubt familiar with the advances in packaging technology introduced over the past decade. At the recent International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, TSMC gave an insightful presentation sharing their vision for packaging roadmap goals and challenges, to address the growing… Read More
Webinar: AMS, RF and Digital Full Custom IC Designs need Circuit Sizing
My career started out by designing DRAM circuits at Intel, and we manually sized every transistor in the entire design to get the optimum performance, power and area. Yes, it was time consuming, required lots of SPICE iterations and was a bit error prone. Thank goodness times have changed, and circuit designers can work smarter … Read More
DAC 2021 – Cliosoft Overview
It’s been awhile since I really looked at what Cliosoft has to offer in the EDA tool space, so at the 58th DAC I stopped by their exhibit booth on Tuesday to visit with Karim Khalfan, VP of Application Engineering, and Simon Rance, VP of Marketing. Their booth had all of the hot market segments listed: Automotive, 5G, IoT, AI, … Read More
Heterogeneous Integration – A Cost Analysis
Heterogeneous integration (HI) is a general term used to represent the diverse possibilities for die technology incorporated into advanced 2.5D/3D packaging. At the recent International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) in San Francisco, a team from Synopsys and IC Knowledge presented data from analyses of future potential… Read More
Methodology for Aging-Aware Static Timing Analysis
At the recent Design Automation Conference, Cadence presented their methodology for incorporating performance degradation measures due to device aging into a static timing analysis flow. [1] (The work was a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics.) This article reviews the highlights of their presentation.
Background… Read More
Delivering Systemic Innovation to Power the Era of SysMoore
With the slowing down of Moore’s law , the industry as a whole has been working on various ways to maintain the rate of growth and advancements. A lot has been written up about various solutions being pursued to address specific aspects. The current era is being referred to by different names, SysMoore being one that Synopsys uses.… Read More
DAC 2021 – Taming Process Variability in Semiconductor IP
Tuesday at DAC was actually my very first time attending a technical session, and the presentation from Nebabie Kebebew, Siemens EDA, was called, Mitigating Variability Challenges of IPs for Robust Designs. There were three presentations scheduled for that particular Designer, IP and Embedded Systems track, but with the COVID… Read More
5 Talks on RISC-V
Veriest recently hosted a webinar focusing on RISC-V as a forerunner of ongoing open-source revolution in chip design. Speakers were distinguished professionals from industry and academia. Webinar covered topics from market trends to open-source hardware initiatives, tools and methodologies.
Zvonimir Bandić: RISC-V … Read More
More Than Moore and Charting the Path Beyond 3nm
The incredible growth that the semiconductor industry has enjoyed over the last several decades is attributed to Moore’s Law. While no one argues that point, there is also industry wide acknowledgment that Moore’s Law started slowing down around the 7nm process node. While die-size reductions still scale, performance jumps… Read More
DAC 2021 – Siemens EDA talks about using the Cloud
My third event at DAC on Monday was all about using EDA tools in the Cloud, and so I listened to Craig Johnson, VP EDA Cloud Solutions, Siemens EDA. Early in the day I heard from Joe Sawicki, Siemens EDA, on the topic of Digitalization.
Why even use the Cloud for EDA? That’s a fair question to ask, and Craig had several high-level… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet