Interesting notes from my most recent Taiwan trip: Taiwan unemployment is at a record low. Scooters once again fill the streets of Hsinchu! TSMC will be passing out record bonuses to a record amount of people. TSMC Fab expansions are ahead of schedule. The new Fab 15 in Taichung went up amazingly fast with equipment moving in later… Read More
GlobalFoundries Production-Ready @ 28nm in Multiple Locations!
GLOBALFOUNDRIES showed off its 28nm design ecosystem at #48DAC last week in San Diego. The company featured a full design ecosystem for its 28nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, including silicon-validated flows, process design kits (PDKs), design-for-manufacturing (DFM), and intellectual property (IP) in partnership… Read More
A Birds-Eye Overview of DRC+
The GlobalFoundries DRC+ platform is one of the most innovative DFM technologies and was well represented at #48DAC. In case you missed it, here is a reprint of a DRC+ overview from GFI just prior to #48DAC:
DRC (Design Rule Constraints) are the fundamental principles in constraining VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) circuit… Read More
Magma, ARM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES
Introduction
Monday morning at DAC I attended the breakfast presentation from Magma, ARM and GLOBALFOUNDRIES. The 28nm node is ready for business using Magma tools and ARM libraries.
During breakfast I met Karim Arabi, Ph.D. from QualComm. He’s a senior director of engineering in San Diego and wanted to learn more about… Read More
GLOBALFOUNDRIES 28nm Design Ecosystem!
GLOBALFOUNDRIES will show off its 28nm design ecosystem at #48DAC next week in San Diego. The company will feature a full design ecosystem for its 28nm High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) technology, including silicon-validated flows, process design kits (PDKs), design-for-manufacturing (DFM), and intellectual property (IP) in partnership… Read More
37 Billion IC with MTP IP from now to 2015: clearly, Kilopass and GlobalFoundries partnership make sense…
Although there has been always a strong relationship between Kilopass and Chartered Semiconductor, this relationship has been even enhanced after the acquisition of Chartered by GLOBALFOUNDRIES, allowing Kilopass’s customers to integrate NVM IP on advanced technology nodes, down to 40nm or even 28nm in the near future.
Before… Read More
AMD and GlobalFoundries / TI and UMC
There have been some significant foundry announcements recently that if collated will give you a glimpse into the future of the semiconductor industry. So let me do that for you here.
First the candid EETimes article about TI dumping Samsung as a foundry:
Taiwan’s UMC will take the ”lead role’’ in making the OMAP 5 device on… Read More
ARM and GlobalFoundries
Although there has been always a strong relationship between ARM and GlobalFoundries, it is interesting to notice that Intel has helped to boost it and make it even stronger. Indeed when AMD renegotiated its x86 licensing deal with Intel in 2009, one of the most significant long-term changes was a marked reduction in how much of … Read More
Process Design Kits: PDKs, iPDKs, openPDKs
One of the first things that needs to be created when bringing up a new process is the Process Design Kit, or PDK. Years ago, back when I was running the custom IC business line at Cadence, we had a dominant position with the Virtuoso layout editor and so creating a PDK really meant creating a Virtuoso PDK, and it was a fairly straightforward… Read More
DRC+, DFM, CMP, Variablility
When I worked at Intel as a circuit design engineer I could talk directly with the technology development engineers to understand how to really push my DRAM designs and get the smallest possible memory cell layout that would still yield well, provide fast access time, and long refresh cycles.
(United States Patent 6661699. Inventor:… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet