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The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 4: Short latency is king

The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 4: Short latency is king
by Frederic Nabki & Dominic Deslandes on 03-12-2020 at 10:00 am

The Story of Ultra WideBand Part 4

How Ultra-wideband aligns with 5G’s premise

In part 3, we discussed the time-frequency duality or how time and bandwidth are interchangeable. If one wants to compress in time a wireless transmission, more frequency bandwidth is needed. This property can be used to increase the accuracy of ranging, as we saw in part 3. Another very… Read More


Turbo-Charge Your Next PCIe SoC with PLDA Switch IP

Turbo-Charge Your Next PCIe SoC with PLDA Switch IP
by Mike Gianfagna on 03-12-2020 at 6:00 am

Integrated NVMe interfaces

SemiWiki has a new IP partner, PLDA and they bring a lot to the party.  Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) is a popular high-performance data interface standard. Think GPUs, RAID cards, WiFi cards or solid-state disk (SSD) drives connected to a motherboard. The protocol offers much higher throughput than previous… Read More


Where have all the Leaders gone – a profile of T.J. Rodgers

Where have all the Leaders gone – a profile of T.J. Rodgers
by Erach Desai on 03-11-2020 at 10:00 am

T.J. Rodgers SemiWiki

Silicon Valley has morphed from the days of semiconductor fabs interspersed between strawberry farms, and 3:00 pm rush-hour traffic during the shift change for the fabrication facility engineers and technicians. The leadership of technology companies has also arguably devolved from people who inspired employees and stewarded… Read More


An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight

An Objective Hardware Security Metric in Sight
by Bernard Murphy on 03-11-2020 at 6:00 am

Metrics

Security has been a domain blessed with an abundance of methods to improve in various ways, not so much in methods to measure the effectiveness of those improvements. With the best will in the world, absent an agreed security measurement, all those improvement techniques still add up to “trust me, our baby monitor camera is really… Read More


The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 3: The Resurgence

The Story of Ultra-WideBand – Part 3: The Resurgence
by Frederic Nabki & Dominic Deslandes on 03-10-2020 at 10:00 am

The Story of Ultra WideBand SemiWiki

In Part 2, we discussed the second false-start of Ultra-WideBand (UWB) leveraging over-engineered orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) transceivers, launching at the dawn of the great recession and surpassed by a new generation of Wi-Fi transceivers. These circumstances signed the end of the proposed applications… Read More


Viewing the Largest IC Layout Files Quickly

Viewing the Largest IC Layout Files Quickly
by Daniel Payne on 03-10-2020 at 6:00 am

Skipper, Empyrean

The old adage, “Time is money”, certainly rings true today for IC designers, so the entire EDA industry has focused on this challenging goal of making tools that help speed up design and physical verification tasks like DRC (Design Rule Checks) and LVS (Layout Versus Schematic). Sure, the big three EDA vendors have… Read More


Achieving Design Robustness in Signoff for Advanced Node Digital Designs

Achieving Design Robustness in Signoff for Advanced Node Digital Designs
by Mike Gianfagna on 03-09-2020 at 10:00 am

Synopsys SemiWiki STARRC Webinar 1

I had the opportunity to preview an upcoming webinar on SemiWiki that deals with design robustness for signoff regarding advanced node digital designs (think single-digit nanometers). “Design robustness” is a key term – it refers to high quality, high yielding SoCs that come up quickly and reliably in the target system. We all… Read More


Six Automated Steps to Design Partitioning for Multi-FPGA Prototyping Boards

Six Automated Steps to Design Partitioning for Multi-FPGA Prototyping Boards
by Daniel Nenni on 03-09-2020 at 6:00 am

Aldec Webinar SemiWiki

Before starting your next FPGA Prototyping Project you should catch the next SemiWiki webinar – “Six Automated Steps to Design Partitioning for Multi-FPGA Prototyping Boards”, in partnership with Aldec.

A significant portion of my  30+ years in the EDA industry has revolved around design verification with some form of FPGA … Read More


Technology Tyranny and the End of Radio

Technology Tyranny and the End of Radio
by Roger C. Lanctot on 03-07-2020 at 10:00 am

Technology Tyranny and the End of Radio

As technology consumers we make tradeoffs.

We let Google peer into our online activity and email communications and we even accept annoying advertisements tied to our browsing activity in order to access free email and browing. We tolerate smartphones with diminishing performance from Apple – even after Apple admits that the

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A Forbidden Pitch Combination at Advanced Lithography Nodes

A Forbidden Pitch Combination at Advanced Lithography Nodes
by Fred Chen on 03-06-2020 at 10:00 am

A Forbidden Pitch Combination at Advanced Lithography Nodes

The current leading edge of advanced lithography nodes (e.g., “7nm” or “1Z nm”) features pitches (center-center distances between lines) in the range of 30-40 nm. Whether EUV (13.5 nm wavelength) or ArF (193 nm wavelength) lithography is used, one thing for certain is that the minimum imaged pitch … Read More