In automotive applications, advanced FinFET processes are great for high levels of integration and low power. But they also present some new challenges in reliability signoff. Ansys will be hosting a webinar to highlight the challenges faced by engineers trying to ensure thermal, electromigration (EM) and electrostatic discharge… Read More





High-Level Synthesis for Automotive SoCs
Some of the world’s most complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) are being developed for automotive applications. These SoCs have heterogeneous architectures with a variety of processors and accelerators that do real-time image processing for assisted and autonomous driving applications. The Bosch Visiontec team, in Sophia Antipolis,… Read More
Power Integrity from 3DIC to Board
The semiconductor industry has built decades of success on hyper-integration to increase functionality and performance while also reducing system cost. But the standard way to do this, to jam more and more functionality onto a single die, breaks down when some of the functions you want to integrate are built in different processes.… Read More
TSMC OIP and the Insatiable Computing Trend!
This year’s OIP was much more lighthearted than I remember which is understandable. TSMC is executing flawlessly, delivering new process technology every year. Last year’s opening speaker, David Keller, used the phrase “Celebrate the way we collaborate” which served as the theme for the conference. This year David’s… Read More
Semiconductor Device Physics, Lab in a Box
One of my favorite classes in college was the lab exercise, mostly because we actually got to use real electronics and then measure something, finally writing it up in our lab notebooks. The issue today is that a college student taking Electrical Engineering probably doesn’t have much access to 10nm FinFET silicon for use… Read More
Webinar Preview: Alexa, can you help me build a better SoC?
Nothing is pushing complexity in system-on-chips (SoCs) designs like the drive (no pun intended) to make autonomous vehicles a widespread reality. Autonomous vehicle systems require heterogeneous architectures with reliable, efficient communications between CPU clusters, vision processing accelerators, storage and… Read More
Is there anything in VLSI layout other than “pushing polygons”?
As I travel a lot in the last 15 years and visited customers as well as friends I was many times invited to talk to the Layout teams. The main purpose is always to encourage automation. So I developed a presentation related to market trend, technology trends, and latest tools advancements. In many cases I present updates from DAC (Design… Read More
Life Imitates Art
Neural nets, neuromorphic computing and other manifestations of artificial intelligence are popular topics these days. You might think of this as art (as in the art of computing) imitating life. What about the other direction – does life ever imitate art in this same sense? A professor at ASU’s Biodesign Institute thinks it can,… Read More
Fusing CMOS IC and MEMS Design for IoT Edge Devices
In my 34 years in IC and EDA, it never ceases to amaze me as to how ingenious designers can be with what is given them. Mentor, a Siemens business, has released a wonderful white paper that is proof of this yet again. The white paper steps through how one of their customers, MEMSIC, used the Tanner tool suite to develop a combination CMOS… Read More
QCOM vs Apple and Everyone Else!
Having worked with Qualcomm in many different capacities during my career I can tell you there are some amazing people in and around that company. I am always positive when people I know are considering working there and QCOM people who leave are an easy reference for other jobs. Unfortunately, I lost respect for the QCOM higher ups… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet