Pressing demands on compute speeds, storage capacity and rapid access to data are not new to the semiconductor industry. A desire for access to on-demand computing resources have always been there. During pre-cloud-computing era, companies provisioned on-demand compute capacity by procuring high performance computing … Read More





Why Would Anyone Perform Non-Standard Language Checks?
The other day, I was having one of my regular chats with Cristian Amitroaie, CEO and co-founder of AMIQ EDA. One of our subjects was a topic that we discussed last year, the wide range of languages and formats that chip design and verification engineers use these days. AMIQ EDA has put a lot of effort into adding support for many of these… Read More
MRAM Magnetic Immunity – Empirical Study Summary
The main threat for the wide adoption of MRAM memories continues to be their lack of immunity to magnetic fields. MRAM magnetic immunity (MI) levels has seen significant research over the years and new data is continuously published from the main MRAM vendors.
This data, however, is rarely compared to magnetic field exposure scenarios… Read More
Can Our Privacy be Protected in Cars?
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” — Benjamin Franklin
I hope Ben Franklin was not opposed to enhancing driving safety, but he may have looked with a jaundiced eye at the proliferation of in-cabin driver monitoring technology. … Read More
SALELE Double Patterning for 7nm and 5nm Nodes
In this article, we will explore the use of self-aligned litho-etch-litho-etch (SALELE) double patterning for BEOL metal layers in the 7nm node (40 nm minimum metal pitch [1]) with DUV, and 5nm node (28 nm minimum metal pitch [2]) with EUV. First, we mention the evidence that this technique is being used; Xilinx [3] disclosed the… Read More
Podcast EP13: The Three Pillars of Verification with Adnan Hamid
Dan goes on a scenic tour of verification with Adnan Hamid, founder and CEO of Breker Verification Systems. We discuss the rather unusual way Adnan got into semiconductors and SoC verification. Adnan then breaks down the verification task into its fundamental parts to reveal what the three pillars of verification are and why … Read More
Foundry Fantasy- Deja Vu or IDM 2?
– Intel announced 2 new fabs & New Foundry Services
– Not only do they want to catch TSMC they want to beat them
– It’s a very, very tall order for a company that hasn’t executed
– It will require more than a makeover to get to IDM 2.0
Intel not only wants to catch TSMC but beat them at their own … Read More
Intel Takes Another Shot at the Enticing Foundry Market
Intel made a big splash on March 23, 2021 by doubling down on manufacturing with the creation of Intel Foundry Services (IFS). The big announcement was supported by potential customers such as Qualcomm, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM. With an accompanying $20B investment, the EDA and equipment industries,… Read More
Flex Logix Closes $55M in Series D Financing and Accelerates AI Inference and eFPGA Adoption
Flex Logix is a unique company. It is one of the few that supplies both FPGA and embedded FPGA technology based on a proprietary programmable interconnect that uses half the transistors and half the metal layers of traditional FPGA interconnect. Their architecture provides some rather significant advantages. I wrote about their… Read More
Reducing Compile Time in Emulation. Innovation in Verification
Is there a way to reduce cycle time in mapping large SoCs to an FPGA-based emulator? Paul Cunningham (GM, Verification at Cadence), Jim Hogan (RIP) and I continue our series on research ideas. As always, feedback welcome.
The Innovation
This month’s pick is Improving FPGA-Based Logic Emulation Systems through Machine Learning… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet