This article will describe the motivations for pursuing a new flow in the SoC design methodology. This flow involves the extraction, evaluation, and analysis of a full electromagnetic coupling model for a complex SoC and its package environment. The results of this analysis highlight the impact of electromagnetic coupling… Read More





It’s The Small Stuff That Gets You …
The last session I attended at DesignCon 2020 wasn’t a session at all. Rather it was an interactive discussion with Todd Westerhoff, product manager for electronic board systems at Mentor Graphics. Todd made some observations about the way high-performance PCBs are designed today and perhaps the way they should be designed. … Read More
The Tech Week that was February 3-7 2020
In a week where the new coronavirus and it’s impact has dominated the news, here is my weekly summary of the key semiconductor and technology news from around the world that you should know but may have missed.
The new coronavirus in China and worldwide is already causing an impact for the electronics supply chain, potentially affecting… Read More
Rest in Peace Randy Smith (1959-2020)
The semiconductor industry lost another good one last week, my friend, co-worker, and longtime SemiWiki contributor, Randy Smith. Randy published sixty blogs on SemiWiki over the last eight years that have been viewed more than a half million times. That is quite a digital legacy, absolutely.
Like myself, and many other semiconductor… Read More
Good December but March variable due to Coronavirus
- Trend remains positive for 2020 overall
- New tools & EUV suggest better growth in 2020
- Calendar 2019 ends on strong foundry note
KLAC reported revenues of $1.509B and EPS of $2.66 NonGAAP versus street of $1.48B and $2.58. Foundry (TSMC) was obviously the big driver of the quarter and into 2020 as well. Memory remains subdued… Read More
AI Interposer Power Modeling and HBM Power Noise Prediction Studies
I attended a session on 2.5D silicon interposer analysis at DesignCon 2020. Like many presentations at this show, ecosystem collaboration was a focus. In this session, Jinsong Hu (principal application engineer at Cadence) and Yongsong He (senior staff engineer at Enflame Tech) presented approaches for interposer power modeling… Read More
Tesla: Two Heads are Better Than One
Telsa Motors’ stock skyrockets and all observers are shocked and amazed. The shorts that took a multi-billion-dollar hit then double down with their concerns regarding the German gigafactory construction permits or coronavirus or the company’s ability to create demand or fulfill it.
All of these investors are ignoring something… Read More
Executive Interview: Howie Bernstein of HCL
Howie began his career at Digital Equipment Corporation working on real-time device drivers, but within a few years started working at the other end of the stack with one of the pioneering electronic mail systems. Since then, Howie has worked on developing systems involving electronic mail, workflow processing, configuration… Read More
TSMC Unveils Details of 5nm CMOS Production Technology Platform Featuring EUV and High Mobility Channel FinFETs at IEDM2019
Back in April, 2019, TSMC announced that they were introducing their 5 nm technology in risk production and now at IEDM 2019 they brought forth a detailed description of the process which has passed 1000 hour HTOL and will be in high volume production in 1H 2020. This 5nm technology is a full node scaling from 7nm using smart scaling… Read More
Verification, RISC-V and Extensibility
RISC-V is obviously making progress. Independent of licensee signups and new technical offerings, the simple fact that Arm is responding – in fundamental changes to their licensing model and in allowing custom user extensions to the instruction set – is proof enough that they see a real competitive threat from RISC-V.
Which all… Read More
Yes Intel Should Go Private