On Monday morning at IEDM, Sri Samavedam of Imec opened the technical program with a plenary talk entitled “Future Logic Scaling: Towards Atomic Channels and Deconstructed Chips”. I am not generally a fan of plenary talks, I think the presenters often try to cover too much in their talks and end up not providing enough detail to be… Read More





The Growing Chasm in Electronic System Design
Since the formation of the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) industry in the 1970s, Moore’s law has increased functionality onto a semiconductor die dramatically. In response, EDA tools for semiconductor design have also grown in functionality and the design processes for semiconductors have moved forward at a breakneck… Read More
Conference: Embedded DevOps
The catchy phrase DevOps is defined by Agile advocates as, “The practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.”
I’ve been developing software since the stone ages, which means… Read More
Technology Optimization for Magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM)
Spin-transfer torque magnetoresistive RAM (STT-MRAM) has emerged from several foundries as a very attractive IP option. An introduction to MRAM technology from GLOBALFOUNDRIES was provided in this earlier SemiWiki article. [1]
Briefly, STT-MRAM is a non-volatile storage option with the following attractive characteristics… Read More
The Coming Evolution in Electronics Design Automation
Electronics design mega-trends have been a transformational force for the world. As shown in blue in Figure 1, the first wave of electronics consisted of centralized computing and the leaders in the field included companies such as IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Wang, and others. Fundamentally, these technologies… Read More
PLDA is at the Leading Edge with Advances in Both PCIe 5.0 and CXL
There are significant advances in communication protocols happening all around us. The Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) Gen 5 standard is delivering the needed device-to-device performance to support artificial intelligence and machine learning applications as well as cloud-based workloads. The rapidly… Read More
Author Interview: Bernard Murphy on his latest book
Over the last 40 years, Bernard has worked with semiconductor and EDA companies in hands-on, management and consulting roles in engineering, sales and marketing. He most recently co-founded Atrenta where he created and led the development of SpyGlass, retiring as CTO when Atrenta was acquired by Synopsys. Post-retirement,… Read More
Optimization for pFET Nanosheet Devices
The next transition from current FinFET devices at advanced process nodes is the “nanosheet” device, as depicted in the figure below. [1]
The FinFET provides improved gate-to-channel electrostatic control compared to a planar device, where the gate traverses three sides of the fin. The “gate-all-around” characteristics… Read More
Podcast EP1: Why are Semiconductors so Sexy?
The goal of this Podcast Series is to bring semiconductor experts together to get to the truth about the matter at hand. We’ll get right to the point and not exceed 30 minutes of your time. If you have a topic you would like us to cover please post it on SemiWiki.com and we will get right to it.
After introductions from Daniel Nenni and his… Read More
SemiWiki in 2021!
Today is SemiWiki’s 10th anniversary so an extra special Happy New Year to all! It has been an exciting 10 year adventure for sure and I hope it can continue for another 10 years, absolutely.
2020 brought in a record amount of content, readers and members. Our readership grew 70% YoY in 2020 according to Google Analytics which is a big… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet