In fact, this is the title of a presentation given by Pete Foley during FD-SOI Forum 2014 held in Shanghai, a couple of weeks ago. What is nice with clever people like Pete Foley is that they get the point, and get it quickly. Getting the point is to insert AND in capital in the title, as using FD-SOI technology allows to benefit from low-power… Read More
Agile IC Development
If you have been involved in software development you have probably heard of the “waterfall” development methodology. This is the approach whereby a complete specification of the software is developed before a single line of code is written. Nowadays, few people develop software that way since it is too slow. And… Read More
MEMS+, Bringing MEMS into the Electronic World
One of the things about MEMS devices is that they almost always live on a chip that also contains the electronics necessary to process the output from the sensor. For example, an on-chip accelerometer for a car airbag deployment will contain the electronics necessary to process the signal from the sensor and end up with something… Read More
Sidense overlays OTP on TSMC 16nm FinFET
Process shrinks, which have served us well for most of the Moore’s Law journey, are reaching their limits. For switching transistors, the biggest problems of leakage current and gate oxide vulnerability in planar MOSFETs have led the industry to new 3D microstructures such as FinFET. For non-volatile memory, the problem is generally… Read More
Design & EDA Collaboration Advances Mixed-Signal Verification through VCS AMS
Last week it was a rare opportunity for me to attend a webinar where an SoC design house, a leading IP provider and a leading EDA tool provider joined together to present on how the tool capabilities are being used for advanced mixed-signal simulation of large designs, faster with accuracy. It’s always been a struggle to combine design… Read More
A couple of misconceptions about FD-SOI
We have extensively discussed in Semiwiki about FD-SOI technology, explaining the main advantages (Faster, Cooler, Simpler), sometimes leading to very deep technical discussions, thanks to Semiwiki readers and their posts. I have recently found an article “Samsung & ST Team Up on 28nm FD-SOI”. This article includes many… Read More
Quicklogic Delivers First Wearable Sensor Hub with Under 150uW Standby
I have talked before about how the Internet of Things (IoT) doesn’t require enormous power-hungry SoCs. We all accept, or at least put up with, having to recharge our phones daily. But smart pedometers (or whatever a good name for Fitbit-like products are) had better last for a week or two between charges.
Today, Quicklogic… Read More
MIPS 64 bit CPU Architecture
Imagination Technologies has just launched the 5[SUP]th[/SUP] generation of MIPS CPU core, the 64-bits Warrior, or I6400 family, offering a total compatibility with the 32-bit previous architecture. MIPS Warrior I-class processor cores offers 64-bit processing in applications including embedded, mobile, digital consumer,… Read More
Kilopass v. Sidense Update!
It looks like Sidense finally has closure on their request for attorney fees. Generally, in the U.S., parties in a lawsuit pay for their respective attorney fees which can be staggering. However, U.S. law allows the courts to shift the payment of the winner’s attorney fees to the losing party for “exceptional” reasons. Based on … Read More
Crossfire – Your partner for IP development, what’s new?
As the SoCs and IPs grow in sizes and complexities, the number of formats, databases, libraries of standard cells and IOs also increase. It becomes a clumsy task to check every cell in a library, its consistency among various format with respect to functionality, timing, naming, labels and so on, and its complex physical properties… Read More