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Intel Direct Connect Event

Intel Direct Connect Event
by Scotten Jones on 02-23-2024 at 12:00 pm

Figure 1

On Wednesday, February 21st Intel held their first Foundry Direct Connect event. The event had both public and NDA sessions, and I was in both. In this article I will summarize what I learned (that is not covered by NDA) about Intel’s business, process, and wafer fab plans (my focus is process technology and wafer fabs).

Business
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Podcast EP209: Putting Soitec’s Innovative Substrates to Work in Mainstream Products with Dr. Christophe Maleville

Podcast EP209: Putting Soitec’s Innovative Substrates to Work in Mainstream Products with Dr. Christophe Maleville
by Daniel Nenni on 02-23-2024 at 10:00 am

Dan is joined by Dr. Christophe Maleville, chief technology officer of Soitec’s Innovation. He joined Soitec in 1993 and was a driving force behind the company’s joint research activities with CEA-Leti. For several years, he led new SOI process development, oversaw SOI technology transfer from R&D to production and managed… Read More


A Candid Chat with Sean Redmond About ChipStart in the UK

A Candid Chat with Sean Redmond About ChipStart in the UK
by Daniel Nenni on 02-23-2024 at 6:00 am

Chip Start UK

When I first saw the Silicon Catalyst business plan 10 years ago I had very high hopes. Silicon Valley design starts were falling and Venture Capital Firms were distracted by software companies even though without silicon there would be no software.

Silicon Catalyst is an organization focused on accelerating silicon-based startups.… Read More


Achieving Extreme Low Power with Synopsys Foundation IP Memory Compilers and Logic Libraries

Achieving Extreme Low Power with Synopsys Foundation IP Memory Compilers and Logic Libraries
by Mike Gianfagna on 02-22-2024 at 10:00 am

Achieving Extreme Low Power with Synopsys Foundation IP Memory Compilers and Logic Libraries

The relentless demand for lower power SoCs is evident across many markets.  Examples include cutting-edge mobile, IoT, and wearable devices along with the high compute demands for AI and 5G/6G communications. Drivers for low power include battery life, thermal management and, for high compute applications, the overall cost… Read More


Navigating the 1.6Tbps Era: Electro-Optical Interconnects and 224G Links

Navigating the 1.6Tbps Era: Electro-Optical Interconnects and 224G Links
by Kalar Rajendiran on 02-22-2024 at 6:00 am

Simulation and Silicon ADC outpit scatter plot

In the relentless pursuit of ever-increasing data speeds, the 1.6 Terabits per second (Tbps) era looms on the horizon, promising unprecedented levels of connectivity and bandwidth within data centers. As data-intensive applications proliferate and the demand for real-time processing escalates, the need for robust and efficient… Read More


Arm Neoverse Continues to Claim Territory in Infrastructure

Arm Neoverse Continues to Claim Territory in Infrastructure
by Bernard Murphy on 02-21-2024 at 10:00 am

Neoverse announcement min

After owning general purpose compute in cell phones and IoT devices, it wasn’t clear what Arm’s next act might be. Seemingly the x86 giants dominated in datacenters and  auguries suggested a bloody war in smaller platforms between Arm and RISC-V. But Arm knew what they were doing all along, growing upwards into infrastructure:… Read More


Pinning Down an EUV Resist’s Resolution vs. Throughput

Pinning Down an EUV Resist’s Resolution vs. Throughput
by Fred Chen on 02-21-2024 at 8:00 am

Pinning Down an EUV Resist's Resolution

The majority of EUV production is on 5nm and 3nm node, implemented by late 2022. Metal oxide resists have not been brought into volume production yet [1,2], meaning that only organic chemically amplified resists (CARs) have been used instead until now. These resists have a typical absorption coefficient of 5/um [3,4], which means

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Cadence Debuts Celsius Studio for In-Design Thermal Optimization

Cadence Debuts Celsius Studio for In-Design Thermal Optimization
by Bernard Murphy on 02-21-2024 at 6:00 am

Celsius Studio min

Continuing the multiphysics theme, I talked recently with Melika Roshandell (Product Management Director at Cadence) on the continuing convergence between MCAD and ECAD. You should know first that Melika has a PhD in mechanical engineering and an extensive background in thermal engineering at Broadcom and Qualcomm, all very… Read More


Handling Preprocessed Files in a Hardware IDE

Handling Preprocessed Files in a Hardware IDE
by Daniel Nenni on 02-20-2024 at 10:00 am

Preprocessor 1

For several years now, I’ve been meeting with AMIQ EDA co-founder Cristian Amitroaie every few months to discuss the state of the industry, key trends in design and verification, and the ways that they help facilitate and accelerate chip development. I noticed an interesting new feature mentioned in their latest press releaseRead More


Chiplet ecosystems enable multi-vendor designs

Chiplet ecosystems enable multi-vendor designs
by Don Dingee on 02-20-2024 at 6:00 am

Chiplet Product Use Cases

Chiplets dominate semiconductor industry conversations right now – and after the recent Chiplet Summit, we expect the intensity to go up a couple of notches. One company name often heard is Blue Cheetah, and we had the opportunity to sit down with them recently to discuss their views and their just-announced design win at Tenstorrent.… Read More