Due to a lot of somewhat aggressive marketing by carriers, you might think that 4G wireless is already here. After all, wasn’t 3G ages ago? But in fact true 4G handsets won’t really be available until 2015/6. But to make that schedule, first silicon needs to be available late this year or early next, to allow one or two … Read More
Semiconductor IP Becomes A Critical Element in ASIC Design
Clearly one of the market trends proving troublesome in the traditional ASIC value chain is the lack of silicon correlated custom IP. And make no mistake, semiconductor IP is a critical decision since it drives both chip level and system level technology differentiation.
Under the traditional ASIC model, vendors had their own… Read More
Magma FineSIM and MunEDA Cooperate
How do I know if an AMS block is tuned for the process and will perform and yield acceptably?… Read More
Why X-Fab uses 3D Resistance Extraction and Analysis
At DAC in 2011 I visited an EDA company called Silicon Frontline Technology because they offered some 3D field solver tools used to create the highest accuracy netlists that can then be simulated with a SPICE circuit simulator to predict timing, power and IR drop. A recent press release with X-FAB and Silicon Frontline looked interesting… Read More
The Old Order Changeth
It is interesting watching as changes in technology bring giants to their knees. Far and away the best book on the subject is Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. If you haven’t read it then rush out and buy it immediately. In tech, you are not educated if you haven’t.
Two things made me think … Read More
FineSim Webinar
FineSim is Magma’s circuit simulator that has been doing extraordinarily well. In my opinion it is one of the big reasons that Synopsys is acquiring (presumably, still subject to approval of course) Magma. FineSim is especially strong in the memory market with over 70% of the top 5 DRAM manufacturers and the top 10 flash manufacturers… Read More
Semiconductor Packaging (3D IC) Emerging As Innovation Enabler!
The ASIC business is getting more and more complicated. The ability to produce innovative die at a competitive price to solve increasingly complex problems just isn’t enough. The technology required to package that die is now front and center.
Here, at the junction of advanced design, process technology and state-of-the art … Read More
Silicon IP has taken over CAE in EDAC results… showing how bad have been analyst in forecasting the IP market!
Thanks to Paul, who has shared EDAC resultsfor Q3 2011, we can see that Silicon IP has definitely passed CAE revenue! It does not appears clearly ($410 million for IP, 566.7 for CAE), but when you consider that ARM, among many other IP vendors, is not part of EDAC, it’s easy to see that SIP revenue is higher than CAE (ARM revenue for 2010… Read More
Samsung’s Regrettable Moment and the Coming of 3D Tick Tock!
The might have beens. The shoulda’s, coulda’s, woulda’s are what launches a thousand Harvard Business School Case Studies that are meant to prepare a generation of business leaders on how to make decisions that impact the future directions of companies. Right before the 2008 financial crises (September … Read More
HiFi audio…in all the devices
The big challenge with audio is that there are so many standards. Some of this is for historical reasons since audio for mobile (such as mp3), for the home (Dolby 5.1) and for cell-phone voice encoding/decoding have all had very different requirements, different standard setters and so on. But gradually everything is coming together.… Read More
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