In my opinion, FinFETs will be the most significant piece of technology we, as semiconductor ecosystem people, will experience this decade. Seriously this is exciting stuff and one of the top search terms on SemiWiki for 6 months running. Here is a quick peek at what the top EDA companies will be talking about at the Common Platform… Read More
Verdi: No Requiem for Openness
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
Double Patterning for IC Design, Extraction and Signoff
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
Yawn… New EDA Leader Results Are Coming
We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.
Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More
IC Design at Analog Bits
This morning I spoke with Mahesh Tirupattur, Executive VP of Analog Bits about IC design challenges and using EDA tools to create high performance, mixed-signal semiconductor IP.
Integrating your SoC into the analog world
Our world is decidedly analog, made up of stimuli for our five basic senses of sight, touch, hearing, taste, and smell, and more advanced senses like balance and acceleration. To be effective on the Internet of Things, digital devices must integrate with the analog world, interfacing with sensors and control elements.… Read More
The Semiconductor Landscape – II
It has been a year since my article Semiconductor Landscape in Jan 2012 I wanted to look back into the major events over the year and then anticipate what’s in store going forward. What has happened over the year is much more than what I could foresee. Major consolidation in EDA space – Synopsys acquired Magma, SpringSoft, Ciranova,… Read More
FinFET Modeling and Extraction at 16-nm
In 2012 FinFET is one of the most talked about MOS technologies of the year because traditional planar CMOS has slowed down on scaling below the 28nm node. To learn more about FinFET process modeling I attended a Synopsys webinar where Bari Biswas presented for about 42 minutes include a Q&A portion at the end.
Bari Biswas, Synopsys… Read More
A Brief History of Synopsys
One of the largest software companies in the world, Synopsys is a market and technology leader in the development and sale of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and semiconductor intellectual property (IP). Synopsys is also a strong supporter of local education through the Synopsys Outreach Foundation. Each year in multiple… Read More
Double Patterning Verification
You can’t have failed to notice that 20nm is coming. There are a huge number of things that are different about 20nm from 28nm, but far and away the biggest is the need for double patterning. You probably know what this is by now, but just in case, here is a quick summary.
Lithography is done using 193nm light. Today we use immersion… Read More