Semiconductor equipment vendor ranking, which didn’t change much between 2016 and 2017, is undergoing a makeover, as Lam Research, ASML, and Tokyo Electron (TEL) are switching places and top-ranked Applied Materials is getting closer to losing its number one ranking.
Since the 1990s, Applied Materials has been the market leader… Read More
Historically, the semiconductor and semiconductor equipment industry were inextricably linked due to the cyclical nature of the chip industry. An increase in semiconductor revenues was followed within a short period with an increase in equipment revenues, as semiconductor companies purchased equipment to make more chips… Read More
PVT – depending on what field you are in those three letters may mean totally different things. In my undergraduate field of study, chemistry, PVT meant Pressure, Volume & Temperature. Many of you probably remember PV=nRT, the dreaded ideal gas law. However, anybody working in semiconductors knows that PVT stands … Read More
We have all become so used to ‘smart’ things that perhaps in a way we have forgotten what it was like before many of the things we use day to day had sensors and microprocessors to help them respond to their environment. Cars are an excellent example. It used to be commonplace to run down your battery by leaving your lights on. Now cars … Read More
The user group events held by EDA companies offer a unique opportunity to hear from designers and CAD engineers who are actually using the EDA tools “in the trenches”. Some user presentations are pretty straightforward – e.g., providing a quality-of-results (QoR) design comparison when invoking a new tool feature added to a recent… Read More
Over the past 50 years in our industry, there have been three invariant principles:
Tom Dillinger and I attended the Silvaco SURGE 2018 event in Silicon Valley last week with several hundred of our semiconductor brethren. Tom has a couple blogs ready to go but first let’s talk about the keynote by Silvaco CEO David Dutton. David isn’t your average EDA CEO, he spent the first 8 years of his career at Intel then spent … Read More
In our previous article bearing the same title, we discussed the recommended baseline checks covering cell and pin presence, back-end, and some front-end checks related to functional equivalency. In this article, we’ll cover the extensive list of characterization checks, that include timing arcs, NLDM, CCS, ECSM/EM, and … Read More
Last month I attended the 2018 U.S. Executive Forum where Wally Rhines was one of the keynotes. I was also lucky enough to have lunch with Wally afterwards and talk about his presentation in more detail and he sent me his slides which are attached to the end of this blog.
The nice thing about Wally’s presentations is that they are not … Read More
As an IC designer I absolutely loved embarking on a new design project, starting with a fresh, blank slate, not having to use any legacy blocks. In the early 1980’s we really hadn’t given much thought to re-using semiconductor IP because each new project typically came with a new process node, so there was no IP even ready… Read More
