Traditional, rule based, RC extractors rely on a substantial base of assumptions, which are increasingly proving unreliable. Having accurate RC extraction results for parasitic R’s and C’s is extremely important for ensuring proper circuit operation and for optimizing performance and power. Advanced process nodes are making… Read More





Functional Safety – the Analytics
ISO 26262 is serious stuff, the governing process behind automotive safety. But, as I have observed before, it doesn’t make for light reading. The standard is all about process and V-diagrams, mountains of documentation and accredited experts. I wouldn’t trade a word of it (or my safety) for a more satisfying read, but all that … Read More
Samsung is Starting 7nm Production with EUV in June
There is a report in the Seoul Economic Daily that Samsung has completed development of their 7nm process using EUV and that production will begin in June. What is claimed in the report is:
- The process is installed in the Hwaseong S3 Fab
- Samsung has more than 10 EUV systems installed
- Production starts in June with Qualcomm, Xilinx,
EDA CEO Outlook 2018 Partly Cloudy
The funniest line of the EDA CEO Outlook event was that we should rename our Amazon Echos Wally. Yes Wally is that smart and he remembers pretty much everything. I wish I could rename my Echo Wally because my daughter in-law is named Alexa so we have to turn it off when she is over. The discussion took an interesting turn with EDA in the … Read More
Is Facebook causing the end of happiness?
For the past 30 years, most of us around the globe have welcomed modern technology with few questions and fewer reservations. We have treated each new product as a “solution” and paid little attention to its accompanying problems.
The past six months, though, has seen a rapid change of opinion in the United States, … Read More
Enabling A Data Driven Economy
The theme of this year CDNLive Silicon Valley keynote given by Cadence CEO, Lip-Bu Tan evolves around data and how it drives Cadence to make a transition from System Design Enablement (SDE) to Data Driven Enablement (DDE). Before elaborating further, he noted on some CDNLive conference statistics: 120 sessions, 84% done by users,… Read More
Intel Based FPGA Prototyping Webinar Replay
Due to the overwhelming response, here is the first part of the webinar that I did with S2C and a link to the replay. Richard Chang, Vice President of Engineering at S2C did the technical part of the webinar. Richard has a Masters degree in Electrical engineering from the University at Buffalo and more than 20 years experience designing… Read More
HCM Is More Than Data Management
While tracking Moore’s Law has become a more expensive and difficult endeavor in the HPC design, the mobile SOC design space is also increasingly heterogeneous and complex. Strict safety guidelines such as the ISO-26262 being imposed in the automotive applications further exacerbate the situation.
Looking closer into the … Read More
A Turnkey Platform for High-Volume IoT
Innovation in smart homes, smart buildings, smart factories and many other contexts differentiates in sensing, in some cases actuation, implementation certainly (low power for example) and rolling up data to the cloud. It isn’t in the on-board CPU and I doubt any of those entrepreneurs want to create their own Bluetooth or Wi-Fi… Read More
Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”? (8)
The year is 1999 and I decided that is time to try something else in layout. In 1989 in Israel I was part of the biggest chip in the world, the Motorola DSP9600. In 1998 in Canada I was part of the biggest Synchronous DRAM in the world, it was time to try analog/mixed signal/RF projects.
The opportunity came from PMC Sierra who already had… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet