I first fell in love with electric vehicles back in 1978 as an Electrical Engineering student, studying at the University of Minnesota. What caught my fancy was a small advertisement listed in the back of Popular Mechanics magazine to build your own electric vehicle by replacing the gas engine of a Honda with an electric motor, so… Read More





TSMC Design Considerations for Gate-All-Around (GAA) Technology
The annual VLSI Symposium provides unique insights into R&D innovations in both circuits and technology. Indeed, the papers presented are divided into two main tracks – Circuits and Technology. In addition, the symposium offers workshops, forums, and short courses, providing a breadth of additional information.
At… Read More
Stochastic Origins of EUV Feature Edge Roughness
Due to the higher energy of EUV (13.3-13.7 nm wavelength) compared to ArF (193 nm wavelength) light, images produced by EUV are more susceptible to photon shot noise.
Figure 1. (Left) 40 nm dense (half-pitch) line image projected onto wafer at 35 mJ/cm2; (Right) 20 nm dense (half-pitch) line image projected onto wafer at 70 mJ/cm2.… Read More
Apple’s Orphan Silicon
Apple’s recent Spring Loaded Event brought us M1-based iMacs. After the MacBook Air and 13” MacBook Pro in the fall, iMacs are the third Mac to jettison Intel processors. With this transition Apple’s T2 chip enters End of Life status, so to speak. The T2 is a bit of an enigma and now it does not have much time left.
We know it performs… Read More
Podcast EP28: Funding approaches for semiconductor startups
Dan is joined by Wally Rhines to discuss funding approaches for semiconductor startups. Wally has led a fundraising effort for a fabless semiconductor startup for the last year. His experience is useful for others who are trying to raise funding for promising semiconductor startups.
Wally Rhines is widely recognized as an expert
CEO Interview: Harald Neubauer of MunEDA
It has been my pleasure to interview Harald Neubauer, CEO of MunEDA. A veteran of the EDA industry, Harald cofounded MunEDA in 2001.
What brought you to the EDA industry?
Well, I always wanted to found a tech startup and was developing and evaluating various business ideas together with my later cofounder Andreas. Soon after we got… Read More
PCIe Gen 6 Verification IP Speeds Up Chip Development
PCIe is a prevalent and popular interface standard that is used in just about every digital electronic system. It is used widely in SOCs and in devices that connect to them. Since it was first released in 2003, it has evolved to keep up with rapidly accelerating needs for high speed data transfers. Each version has doubled in throughput,… Read More
The Design Lifecycle of an Electronics Interface
We live in a world run by electronics systems. With the exception of completely isolated systems, all others take inputs, process them and produce outputs. The value of a system is determined not only by how well it processes the inputs but also by how well it handles inputs and outputs. Handling in this context means, how much data… Read More
When Implementing 112G PAM4 Channels, Getting There is Half the Fun
The slogan in the title of this post originated with the cruise ship industry in the 1950s. The comment resonated then, and it continues to do so now. In a different context of course. Consider the substantial pressure for higher bandwidth channels. 5G has lit the fuse on a massive increase in wireless data volumes. IoT, autonomous… Read More
The Zen of Auto Safety – a Path to Enlightenment
Safety is a complex topic, but we’re busy. We take the course, get the certificate. Check, along with a million other things we need to do. But maybe it’s not quite that simple. I talked recently with Kurt Shuler (VP of marketing) and Stefano Lorenzini (functional safety manager) at Arteris IP and concluded that finding enlightenment… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet