Much though some of us might wish otherwise, distributed development teams are here to stay. Modern SoC design requires strength and depth in expertise in too many domains to effectively source from one site; competitive multi-national businesses have learned they can very effectively leverage remote sites by building centers… Read More





Calibre Can Calculate Chip Yields Correlated to Compromised SRAM Cells
It seems like I have written a lot about SRAM lately. Let’s face it SRAM is important – it often represents large percentages of the area on SOC’s. As such, SRAM yield plays a major role in determining overall chip yields. SRAM is vulnerable to defect related failures, which unlike variation effects are not Gaussian in nature. Fabrication… Read More
SPIE 2017: Irresistible Materials EUV Photoresist
Irresistible Materials (IM) is a spin-out of the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom that has been doing research on Photoresist and Spin-On Carbon hard masks for 10 years, most recently with Nano-C on chemistry development. IM has developed a unique EUV photoresist and they are now looking for partners to help bring… Read More
TSMC Design Enablement Update
A couple of recent semiwiki articles reviewed highlights of the annual TSMC Technical Symposium recently held in Santa Clara (links here, here, and here). One of the captivating sessions at every symposium is the status of the Design Enablement for emerging technologies, presented at this year’s event by Suk Lee, Senior… Read More
Webinar: Chip-Package-System Design for ADAS
When thinking of ADAS from an embedded system perspective, it is tempting to imagine that system can be designed to some agreed margins without needing to worry too much about the details of the car environment and larger environment outside the car. But that’s no longer practical (or acceptable) for ADAS or autonomous systems.… Read More
The Driver in the Driverless Car
What is the likelihood that the people building Uber’s self-driving technologies did not know that their software was highly imperfect and could endanger lives if the cars were let loose on public streets? Or that employees of Theranos did not know that their equipment would produce inaccurate diagnostics?
San Francisco has … Read More
The Fate of Autonomous
The latest installment in the “Fast and Furious” franchise will debut bringing the concept of remote control of cars into the mainstream. Suffice it to say that remote control plays a major role in the script.
This will only be the latest chapter of a long-running effort to demonize autonomous vehicle technology in… Read More
14nm 16nm 10nm and 7nm – What we know now
Last week Intel held a manufacturing day where they revealed a lot of information about their 10nm process for the first time and information on competitor processes continues to slowly come out as well. I thought it would be useful to summarize what we know now, especially since some of what Intel announced was different than what… Read More
The Rise of Transaction-Based Emulation
One serious challenge to the early promise of accelerating verification through emulation was that, while in theory the emulator could run very fast, options for driving and responding to that fast model were less than ideal. You could use in-circuit emulation (ICE), connecting the emulation to real hardware and allowing you… Read More
Machine Learning Accelerates Library Characterization by 50 Percent!
Standard cell, memory, and I/O library characterization is a necessary, but time-consuming, resource intensive, and error-prone process. With the added complexity of advanced and low power manufacturing processes, fast and accurate statistical and non-statistical characterization is challenging, creating the need … Read More
Intel’s Path to Technological Leadership: Transforming Foundry Services and Embracing AI