For a couple of years the GSA has had working group looking at funding of semiconductor investment. There is a general feeling, which I share, that it is hard to get a fabless semiconductor company off the ground (nobody would dream of trying to create one with a fab these days) due to the size of the investment and the relatively long… Read More
Sage Design Automation iDRM Launch
This is an example of what I do during the day. I work with emerging companies on disruptive technologies and help launch them into the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. This product, iDRM, is the result of three years of joint development work amongst three semiconductor foundries and some of their top customers:… Read More
Mobile Storage Interfaces: There are a Lot
Storage interfaces for mobile are evolving rapidly, in particular with the Universal Flash Storage (UFS) standard. So how do you test a design? If you want to test a design that accesses, say, an SD card then you can wander into Fry’s and buy an SD card for a few dollars. But to design an interface to UFS is a bit harder since the … Read More
An AMS Seminar on May 16th
Analog and Mixed-Signal (AMS) designers are facing more challenges than ever, so where can they go to get some relief? One place is a half-day seminar scheduled for May 16th in Bridgewater, New Jersey. SemiWiki has teamed up with Tanner EDA, Abbot Labs and SoftMEMS to present topics of:
- True collaborative design enabled through
Crossfire – Builds Quality with Design
Very often we talk about increasing design complexities and verification challenges of SoCs. With ever growing design sizes and multiple IPs on a single SoC, it’s a fact that SoC design has become heterogeneous, being developed by multiple teams, either in-house or outsourced. Considering economic advantage amid pressure … Read More
Transient Noise Analysis (TNA)
Tanner EDA Applications Engineers see a broad range of technical challenges that our users are trying to overcome. Here’s one worth sharing – it deals with transient noise analysis (TNA) for a comparator design. The customer is a producer of advanced flow measurement devices for application in medicine and research. The designer… Read More
MOS-AK/GSA Munich Workshop
The MOS-AK/GSA Modeling Working Group, a global compact modeling standardization forum, completed its annual spring compact modeling workshop on April 11-12, 2013 at the Institute for Technical Electronics, TUM, Munich. The event received full sponsorship from leading industrial partners including MunEDA and Tanner EDA.… Read More
NVM IP Security Solutions…
If you need securely storing in your SoC a data which is by nature unique, like encryption key, or a software code update, then you will probably decide to implement a Non Volatile Memory (NVM) block, delivered as an IP function, instead of using an expensive CMOS technology with embedded Flash capability. For example, Synopsys … Read More
GSA European Executive Forum
The first week of June is DAC in Austin of course. But over in Europe, the Wednesday and Thursday of that week, June 5-6th is the GSA European Executive Forum, bringing C-level executives together from all over Europe. It actually runs from 2pm on Wednesday until about 2pm on Thursday including a VIP dinner on Wednesday evening sponsored… Read More
Andes, ARM, Imagination, MIPS
The last session of the day for Linley Mobile was about processors to go into smartphones. One surprise was that there is a core that nobody seems to have heard of since it is only really used in Taiwan up until now, and it is used in several Mediatek chips.
The most “glamorous” processor in a smartphone is the one in the application… Read More