Last month in Shanghai was a meeting of the FD-SOI consortium. The focus of the meeting was largely on the suitability of using FD-SOI to serve the Chinese market. The fabs in China are not right on the bleeding edge and are very cost-sensitive so 28nm is probably as advanced as they will get for a long time if not indefinitely. China … Read More
What Presentations to Attend During IP-SoC 2014 ?
Will you go to Grenoble next week to attend to IP-SoC? I will do it and will certainly listen to these Keynote Talks:
- “Platform IP: the next wave for SOCs from IoT to Datacenter” by Tony King-Smith, Executive Vice President, Marketing , Imagination Technologies
- “From Server-class to IoT SoCs: Enabling System
GNSS, dead reckoning, and MEMS IMUs
GNSS is a wonderful invention, and low cost receivers have crept into smartphones and other mobile devices. However, GNSS does not solve all problems, especially in urban environments. The canyon effect blocks signals at street level between tall buildings, and signals do not penetrate to the interior of parking garages, tunnels,… Read More
Adding a Digital Block to an Analog Design
My engineering background includes designing at the transistor-level, so I was drawn to attend a webinar today presented by Tanner EDAand Incentia about Adding a Digital Block to an Analog Design. Many of the 30,000 users of Tanner tools have been doing AMS designs, so adding logic synthesis and static timing analysis from Incentia… Read More
Imec and Coventor Partner Up
Today imec and Coventor announced a joint development project for 10nm and 7nm process development. Imec, which is in Leuven Belgium, is a partner with pretty much all the semiconductor companies that are planning work at these advanced nodes. It mostly does pre-competitive research and development. This type of research is … Read More
Crossfire on Continuous Path of Improvement
In an ever growing world of IPs, it’s essential that a tool which vouches to simplify designer’s job of IP development and help improving its quality remains versatile to encompass various formats, databases, common data models, standard libraries, scripting etc. that are used in the development of IPs and their exchange between… Read More
Did we forget non-volatile memory?
In our rush to shrink SoC nodes more and more to achieve better performance and more complex devices, we may have forgotten a passenger in the back seat: non-volatile memory. There has been little discussion of this in the pages of SemiWiki until now. Let’s give it a closer look.
Embedded flash has usually been associated with microcontrollers,… Read More
GPU Benchmarks? Try to See the Complete Picture…
We all know benchmarks, but do we really understand benchmark results? Benchmark users should always look beyond the simple score when making in-depth technical analysis and request to see all the facts. There are many graphics benchmarks to choose from but let’s name today these three below:
3DMark Ice Stormfrom Futuremark… Read More
How ST Designs with Layout Dependent Effects (LDE)
I first visited STat their Agrate, Italy site where Flash memory development is done. At DACthis year Antonio Bogani talked about how ST designs with LDE while using EDA tools and a PDK (Process Design Kit) from Cadence. They recorded the 17 minute presentation, and you can view it herewithout having to register. Antonio’s… Read More
Proving the Power of Virtual Fabrication
There are many facets of our lives that are being driven to a more virtual method of doing things. This is largely due to issues such as scaling due to whatever reason – technical, business, economic. Let’s look at some general cases: In yesteryears people used to travel all the way for face-to-face meetings; today virtual meetings… Read More