CAST Compression IP Webinar 800x100 (2)

Analog Mixed-Signal Layout in a FinFET World

Analog Mixed-Signal Layout in a FinFET World
by Tom Dillinger on 03-20-2016 at 12:00 pm

The intricacies of analog IP circuit design have always required special consideration during physical layout. The need for optimum device and/or cell matching on critical circuit topologies necessitates unique layout styles. The complex lithographic design rules of current FinFET process nodes impose additional restrictions… Read More


Internet of Things Augmented Reality Applications Insights from Patents

Internet of Things Augmented Reality Applications Insights from Patents
by Alex G. Lee on 03-19-2016 at 9:00 am

US20150347850 illustrates an IoT (Internet of Things) AR (Augmented Reality) application in a smart home. A smart home IoT device communicates via a local network to a user AR device (e.g., smartphone) for providing the tracking data. The tracking data describes the smart home IoT device. The AR devices can recognize the smart… Read More


How HBM Will Change SOC Design

How HBM Will Change SOC Design
by Tom Simon on 03-19-2016 at 7:00 am

High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) promises to do for electronic product design what high-rise buildings did for cities. Up until now, electronic circuits have suffered from the equivalent of suburban sprawl. HBM is a radical transformation of memory architecture that will have huge ripple effects on how SOC based electronics are … Read More


Can Qualcomm avoid repeating Motorola’s fate?

Can Qualcomm avoid repeating Motorola’s fate?
by Don Dingee on 03-18-2016 at 4:00 pm

NPR had an interesting guest this morning: Edward Luce, author of “Time to Start Thinking: America in the Age of Descent”. I’m not about to turn SemiWiki into a politics blog, but there is some precedent in the technology business. I’ve caught myself saying more than once recently that “Motorola is no longer the company I worked 14… Read More


Custom IC Design Flow with OpenAccess

Custom IC Design Flow with OpenAccess
by Daniel Payne on 03-18-2016 at 12:00 pm

Imagine being able to use any combination of EDA vendor tools for schematic capture, SPICE circuit simulation, layout editing, place & route, DRC, LVS and extraction. On the foundry side, how about creating just a single Process Development Kit (PDK), instead of vendor-specific kits. Well, this is the basic premise of a recent… Read More


Autonomy at Odds with Security

Autonomy at Odds with Security
by Roger C. Lanctot on 03-17-2016 at 4:00 pm

It’s funny that we all now believe that Google got the automated driving ball rolling. The reality is that the government started it all with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and its famous DARPA Grand Challenge, which consisted of three tests (in 2004, 2005 and 2007) of driverless cars in different driving… Read More


VC Apps Tutorial at DVCon 2016

VC Apps Tutorial at DVCon 2016
by Bernard Murphy on 03-17-2016 at 7:00 am

We might wish that all our design automation needs could be handled by pre-packaged vendor tool features available at the push of a button, but that never was and never will be the case. In the language of crass commercialism, there may be no broad market for those features, even though you consider that analysis absolutely essential.… Read More