When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI.… Read More
Materials Selection Methodology White PaperThe Granta EduPack White Paper on Materials Selection,…Read More
Formal Verification: Why It Matters for Post-Quantum CryptographyFormal verification is becoming essential in the design…Read More
Architecting Your Next SoC: Join the Live Discussion on Tradeoffs, IP, and Ecosystem RealitiesDesigning a system-on-chip (SoC) has never been more…Read More
CEO Interview with Andrew Skafel of Edgewater WirelessAs the demand for high-capacity, low-latency wireless networks…Read More
CAST Webinar About Supercharging Your Systems with Lossless Data Compression IPsMuch of advanced technology is data-driven. From the…Read More
IOT Security Trends – Is the online world more dangerous??
Security threats are the biggest concern among the main concerns on the Internet of Things. Due to its very nature, it is a target of interest for those who want to commit either industrial or national espionage. By hacking into these systems and putting them under a denial of service, or other attacks, an entire network of systems… Read More
A Versatile Design Platform with Multi-Language APIs
In one of my whitepapers “SoCs in New Context – Look beyond PPA”, I had mentioned about several considerations which have become very important in addition to power, performance, and area (PPA) of an SoC. This whitepaper was also posted in parts as blogs on Semiwiki (links are mentioned below). Two important… Read More
Get ready for hypergrade in automotive
With use cases expanding, the meaning of “automotive qualified” semiconductors is changing. What we’re now hearing about now is beyond the AEC-Q100 Grade 0 upper end of 150°C, while still meeting other reliability, retention, and security requirements. What does hypergrade mean for complex digital chip… Read More
More on the Practical Uses of Automation
There’s a good article in the March issue of the Communications of the ACM which follows a theme I commented in my “One, Two Many” post. But the CACM article has a better title: “Automation should be like Iron Man, not Ultron”.
For anyone who hasn’t seen the movies, Iron Man is a man (Tony Stark)… Read More
A Better Way for Analog Designers to Perform Variation Analysis
The impact of process variation at advanced nodes is increasing — no surprise there. In recent years, the principal design emphasis to better reflect this variation has been the adoption of two new methodologies: (1) advanced on-chip variation (AOCV, as well as POCV/LVF) for digital static timing analysis, and (2) advanced… Read More
Is Elon Musk from the Future?
One of the more annoying (ie. delightful) things about Tesla Motors is the way the company casually disrupts long established auto industry business models. Whether it is vehicle sales and service or overcoming EV range anxiety or using your car to as an extension of the power grid or letting your car drive itself.
The latest twist… Read More
Semiconductor Merger Mania Explained!
Next week is the Mentor U2U Conference in Silicon Valley. By chance I had coffee with one of the U2U keynote speakers while we were waiting for the FD-SOI Symposium to start last week and can tell you this FREE event is one you don’t want to miss:… Read More
Dr. Evil and On-Chip "LASERS" for Silicon Photonics
In the 1999 comedy, The Spy Who Shagged Me, Dr. Evil laments about why he can’t have sharks with “laser beams” attached to their heads. I get the feeling that silicon photonic designers sometimes feel the same way about why they don’t yet have integrated on-chip laser light sources. While off-chip light… Read More
Single Electron Transistors; the Single Answer?
According to a press release made last year by Gartner, “the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company,” there is projected to be nearly 21 billion internet connected devices by the year 2020 [1]. With the Internet of Things’ ever growing list of network connected devices,… Read More
Making Intel Great Again!