I recently attended the IoT Developers Conference in Santa Clara, CA. There were clearly two major themes in the talks – security and low power. The volume market in IoT is in the edge node devices. These devices have two important characteristics. They acquire data which needs to be transmitted and they typically are battery-driven… Read More




Reusable HW/SW Interface for Portable Stimulus
Although semiconductor community has ushered into the era of SoCs, the verification of SoCs is still broken. There is no single methodology or engine to verify a complete SoC; this results in duplication of efforts and resources for test creation and verification at multiple stages in the SoC development, albeit with different… Read More
IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) – Moving the Electronics Industry Forward
IMEC is a technology research center located in Belgium that is one of the premier semiconductor research centers in the world today. The IMEC Technology Forum (ITF) is a two-day event attended by approximately 1,000 people to showcase the work done by IMEC and their partners.
Gary Patton is the Chief Technical Officer and Senior… Read More
iDRM – A Complete Design Rule Development System
Design rules are at the heart of the interface between the foundry and semiconductor designers, which makes them so critical. Traditionally, design rules and DRC decks have been developed manually with no or little automation. Design rule definitions are written using WORD or other general purpose office tools, and DRC decks… Read More
Quick Guide to FD-SOI at #53DAC
If you’re headed to #53DAC (June 5-9 in Austin,TX) and are interested in learning more about FD-SOI, there will be lots of opportunities. Here’s a quick guide to get you started. … Read More
Making a smart city like Austin smarter
One of the takeaways from the recent #NXPFTF in Austin was the potential for smart cities. As the EDA industry gathers again for @53rdDAC, visitors will see firsthand how much high-tech talent there is in #ATX – and how big a challenge is developing.… Read More
Layout Pattern Matching for DRC, DFM, and Yield Improvement
It is truly amazing to consider the advances in microelectronic process development, using 193i photolithography. The figure below is a stark reminder of the difference between the illuminating wavelength and the final imaged geometries. This technology evolution has been enabled by continued investment in mask data generation… Read More
Go Native – With Methodics at DAC in Austin
DAC is often a yearly reflection point for the companies that exhibit and attend. For the innovators it is an opportunity to look back and see a year of progress and development. Fortunately, this is the case for Methodics, which has had a strong year both in terms of business and technical development. Though, we easily see how these… Read More
TSMC Update at #53DAC!
TSMC is having an interesting year for sure. I was at the TSMC Symposium in Hsinchu last week and everyone was talking about the new 16FFC process. Silicon is out and it is exceeding expectations leading some people (me included) to believe that TSMC 16FFC will be the next TSMC 28nm in regards to popularity. To be clear, 16FFC is currently… Read More
Bringing Human-Like Intelligent Vision Processing to Low-Power Embedded Systems
Semiconductor IP has always been one of the most interesting topics on SemiWiki. Since going online in January of 2011 there have been a total of 592 IP related blogs that have been viewed 2,581,118 times. 79 of those blogs have been about CEVA, the number one licensor of digital signal processing (DSP) IP for a wide range of power-efficient,… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing