In the old days to learn about new semiconductor IP you would have to schedule a sales call, listen to the pitch, then decide if the IP was promising or not. Today we have webinars which offer a lot less drama than a sales call, plus you get to ask your questions by typing away at the comfort of your desk, hopefully wearing headphones as … Read More
In the EDA space, nothing seems to be more fragmented in-term of solutions than in the Design Verification (DV) ecosystem. This was my apparent impression from attending the four panel sessions plus numerous paper presentations given during DVCon 2018 held in San Jose. Both key management and technical leads from DV users community… Read More
Thanks to my growing involvement in formal (at least in writing about it), I was happy to accept an invite to this year’s Oski DVCon dinner / Formal Leadership Summit. In addition to Oski folks and Brian Bailey (an esteemed colleague at another blog site, to steal a Frank Schirrmeister line), a lively group of formal users attended… Read More
We (SemiWiki) have been working with Fractal for close to five years now publishing 25 blogs that have garnered more than 100,000 views. Generally speaking QA people are seen as the unsung heroes of EDA since the only time you really hear about them is when something goes wrong and a tapeout is delayed or a chip is respun.
FinFETs really… Read More
Variation analysis continues to be increasingly important as process technology moves to more advanced nodes. It comes as no surprise that tool development in this area has been vigorous and aggressive. New higher reliability IC applications, larger memory sizes and much higher production volumes require sophisticated yield… Read More
At Intel back in the late 1970’s we wanted to know what process corner each DRAM chip and wafer was trending at so we included a handful of test transistors in the scribe lines between the active die. Having test transistors meant that we could do a quick electrical test at wafer probe time to measure the P and N channel transistor… Read More
When I started dabbling in hardware again for fun using Arduinos about five years ago, it had been a long time since I had played with microprocessor chips. The epiphany for me was seeing how easy it was to load programs onto the onboard flash on something like an Atmel AVR using the SPI interface. My previous experience decades early… Read More
If you haven’t noticed, there has been a BIG influx of money into Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies. Most recently, the Chinese government announced that AI is one of their top initiatives with a goal to catch up with the United States within 3 years and to be the world leader in AI by the year 2030. Horizon Robotics, founded… Read More
I come from a car-centric family where my father actually bought and sold over 300 vehicles in his lifetime, so automotive mega-trends pique my interest. A new conference called Semiconductors ISO 26262 held it’s first annual event last month, meeting in Munich with guest speakers from some impressive companies like: … Read More
2017 was a banner year for semiconductor sales as they topped $400B for the first time, an increase of some 20%, there is happiness in Silicon Valley, Taiwan, South Korea, and well, everywhere. With the foundries pushing to ever-smaller process dimensions and even going back to mature nodes and offering more variations that are… Read More
