ASIC design service companies are an essential piece of the SC ecosystem, as well as Silicon Foundries, EDA and IP vendors. Their customers range from pure fabless with no ASIC design resources, who need a third party to turn a concept into a real product (IC) and then market and sale it, to large IDM temporarily lacking design resource… Read More
Mobile SoCs: Two Cores are Better Than Four?
I came across an interesting white-paper from ST Ericsson on two topics: multi-processors in mobile platforms and FD-SOI. FD-SOI is the ST Microelectronics alternative to FinFETs for 20nm and below. It stands for Fully-Depeleted Silicon-on-Insulator. But I’m going to save that part of the white-paper for another blog… Read More
Oasys RealTime Explorer
The current methodology in design in most companies, and certainly many of the biggest, is that front end RTL design is done by one team with a limited set of front-end design tools. This is then eventually passed off to the physical design team who run all the scripts, do the “real” synthesis, place & route and timing… Read More
Interface Protocols, USB3, PCI Express, MIPI, SATA… the winners and losers in 2012
Who makes the decision and declare that a specific interface protocol is successful? Not me, as I can only consolidate market share data and some insight information coming from the industry. The end user, when going to a shop (real or virtual) and spend a significant part of his budget to buy an electronic product, selecting among… Read More
HiFi Mini, Always Listening
Next week it is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and so there are announcements around the areas where consumer overlaps with semiconductor, which these days is primarily mobile. Then in February in Barcelona is Mobile World Congress, which is even more focused on mobile. Expect more announcementst there.
Currently… Read More
Novocell team finishes record-breaking year with record number of new customers
In this pretty shaky NVM IP market, where articles frequently mention legal battles rather than product features, it seems interesting to take a look at this Newsletter from Novocell Semiconductor starting with these words: “As the Christmas carols and festive music floods the airwaves (and the shopping areas) here in western… Read More
Challenges of Implementing LTE
LTE (Long Term Evolution) is the true 4G standard for cellular and, over time, wireless internet. In fact it is several different standards with different levels of performance. LTE will eventually be the only technology used in cellular, voice will simply be Voice-over-IP (VoIP, the same technology that companies like Skype… Read More
How accurate are AMS Behavioral Models?
You often hear the mantra that Analog Mixed-Signal (AMS) behavioral models are inaccurate. It is repeated so often that it starts to morph into “AMS models are inherently inaccurate”. This is not true.
Source: Wikipedia
… Read More
A Brief History of Today’s Flexible ASIC Model
There’s been an interesting trend emerging the past couple of years; a gentrification, if you will, of the ASIC business. What was thought to be a dying supply chain model has re-emerged as a health and growing segment of the semiconductor industry. Recent figures from Gartner place 2012 ASIC revenue at around $24.4 billion… Read More
Laker3 in TSMC 20nm Reference Flow
SpringSoft, soon to be part of Synopsys but officially still a separate company for now, just announced that Laker[SUP]3[/SUP], the third generation of their layout product family, is featured in TSMC’s 20nm Custom Reference Flow.
Laker 20nm advancements include new double patterning-aware design and voltage-dependent… Read More
More Headwinds – CHIPS Act Chop? – Chip Equip Re-Shore? Orders Canceled & Fab Delay