eSilicon presented their advanced ASIC design capabilities at a seminar last Wednesday evening. This event was closed to the press, bloggers and analysts, but I managed to get some details from a friend who attended. The event title was: “Advanced ASICs for the Cloud-Computing Era: Succeeding with 56G SerDes, HBM2, 2.5D and FinFET… Read More
Six Reasons to Consider Using FPGA Prototyping for ASIC Designs
There’s no doubt that programmable logic in FPGAs have transformed our electronics industry for the better. If you do ASIC designs then there’s always the pressure of getting first silicon correct, with no functional or timing bugs, because bugs will cause expensive re-spins and delay time to market. ASIC designers… Read More
Lu Dai: Incoming Accellera Chair
One of the fun things about what I do is getting to meet some of the movers and shakers in the industry. You might not think of Accellera as a spot to find movers and shakers, but when you consider the impact they have had on what we do (OVL, SystemVerilog, UVM, UPF, SystemC, IP-XACT and others), design today would be unrecognizable without… Read More
SPIE 2017: EUV Readiness for High Volume Manufacturing
The SPIE Advanced Lithography Conference is the world’s leading conference addressing photolithography. This year on the opening day of the conference, Samsung and Intel presented papers summarizing the readiness of EUV for high volume manufacturing (HVM). In this article, I will begin by summarizing the EUV plans … Read More
An Steegen ISS Talk and Interview – Patterning Options for Advanced Nodes
At the ISS Conference in January, An Steegen EVP of Semiconductor Technology & Systems at imec gave a talk entitled “Patterning Options for Advanced Technology Nodes”. I was present for her talk and had the opportunity to have a follow up interview with An.… Read More
Webinar: FPGA Prototyping and ASIC Design
When you think about working with an ASIC service provider like Open-Silicon, you probably think about handling all the architecture, design and verification/validation in your shop, handing over a netlist and some other collateral, then the ASIC services provider takes responsibility for implementation and manufacturing.… Read More
Strong pickup in semiconductors in 2017
World Semiconductor Trade Statistics (WSTS) is an organization of semiconductor companies created to collect market data. The members of WSTS also meet twice per year to develop forecasts for the semiconductor market. The “forecast by committee” approach of WSTS usually results in conservative forecasts. However, WSTS called… Read More
Another Live Event at Samsung!
Last week Samsung hosted the GSA Silicon Valley “State of the Industry” Meet-up which was well attended by the semiconductor elite, myself included. The agenda started with an update on the semiconductor industry outlook followed by deep dives into Automotive, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity all of which are… Read More
Four Barriers to Using an SoC for IoT Projects
I often read about the large number of expected IoT design starts around the world, so I started to think about what the barriers are for launching this industry in order to meet the projections. One of my favorite IoT devices is the Garmin Edge 820, a computer for cyclists that has sensors for speed, cadence, power, heart rate, altitude… Read More
Intel Alternative Facts!
Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, announced a $7B investment in Fab 42 in Arizona in the oval office, next to Trump as evidence of a positive reaction to Trump’s new policies.
Alternative fact; Paul Otellini, then Intel’s CEO, made a similar promise about Fab 42 in the company of Obama in 2011, during a visit to Hillsboro,… Read More
Rethinking Multipatterning for 2nm Node