SILVACO 073125 Webinar 800x100

Will those IO pad rings pass foundry muster?

Will those IO pad rings pass foundry muster?
by Beth Martin on 05-31-2015 at 10:00 pm

I was talking recently to Dina Medhat, a senior technical marketing engineer at Mentor, about, of all things, IO rings. It has not occurred to me that verifying that your IO rings comply with foundry rules presents new challenges.

IO ring checking isn’t new, nor is it unique to advanced IC process nodes. However, the same forces of… Read More


NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile

NVIDIA and Qualcomm Talk about High Level Synthesis, Samsung on Low Power for Mobile
by Daniel Payne on 05-31-2015 at 4:00 pm

Since 1978 I’ve seen many trends in the semiconductor design world: transistor-level IC design, gate-level design, RTL coding, High Level Synthesis (HLS) and IP re-use. We’ve witnessed the growth in design productivity enabling chips starting with just thousands of transistor all the way up to billions of transistors… Read More


Atmel Tightens Automotive Focus with Three New Cortex-M7 MCUs

Atmel Tightens Automotive Focus with Three New Cortex-M7 MCUs
by Majeed Ahmad on 05-31-2015 at 11:30 am

Atmel Corp., a lead partner for the ARM Cortex-M7 processor launch in October 2014, has unveiled three new M7-based microcontrollers with a unique memory architecture and advanced connectivity features for the connected car market.

According to the company spokesman, E70, V71 and V70 chips are the industry’s highest performing… Read More


Changing Trends at the Top of Semicon Space

Changing Trends at the Top of Semicon Space
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-31-2015 at 5:00 am

As we have moved down from a CAGR of ~9% over last three decades to a CAGR of ~5% in the current decade, it’s time to check the realities. It can be definitely argued that a 5% of CAGR over a solid base of ~$378 billion should be considered good enough. In my view that’s the sign of maturity in the semiconductor market. At the same time we are… Read More


Semiconductor Acquisitions will Fuel Innovation!

Semiconductor Acquisitions will Fuel Innovation!
by Daniel Nenni on 05-30-2015 at 7:00 am

Has the semiconductor world gone acquisition crazy? It certainly seems that way with the more than $60B in M&A activity which may now include Altera. We are probably getting close to the 80/20 rule where 80% of the semiconductor revenue is being generated by 20% of the companies. Not far off from where we were at 25 years ago when… Read More


"Cook’s Law" supersedes "Moore’s Law"-its impact on Apple, Samsung, TSMC & Intel

"Cook’s Law" supersedes "Moore’s Law"-its impact on Apple, Samsung, TSMC & Intel
by Robert Maire on 05-29-2015 at 7:00 am

Apple drives the semi industry harder than Wintel ever did: Is winning Apple’s chip business a pyrrhic victory? Is 14nm done before it starts? Too short to be profitable?

Chips marching to an Apple cadence…

In the “old days” when Wintel ruled the roost and drove the semi industry, it was driving spending
Read More


SITRI and Coventor Partner to Scale Up MEMS in China

SITRI and Coventor Partner to Scale Up MEMS in China
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-28-2015 at 12:00 pm

When it comes to wearable technology and the rapidly emerging world of IoT, sensors and MEMS are on the frontlines. They collect and transfer raw data such as pressure, temperature and motion and process it with algorithms critical to making sure the right information gets to humans and/or machines so the right reaction is enabled.… Read More


WarpStor, the Data Tardis: Small on the Outside, Large on the Inside

WarpStor, the Data Tardis: Small on the Outside, Large on the Inside
by Paul McLellan on 05-28-2015 at 7:00 am

There is a data explosion:

  • IBM says that 90% of all data was created in the last 2 years
  • Smartphone processor development requires 100GB of data per engineer
  • Android testing requires 30GB times the number of tests times the number of testers
  • Biotech simulation, game development and more all require enormous amounts of data

This … Read More


Why Design Data Management: A View from CERN

Why Design Data Management: A View from CERN
by Majeed Ahmad on 05-27-2015 at 10:00 pm

On July 4, 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, announced that the ATLAS and CMS experiments had each observed a new particle, which is consistent with the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector with a broad physics… Read More


Will Dark Silicon Dictate Server Blade Architecture?

Will Dark Silicon Dictate Server Blade Architecture?
by Tom Simon on 05-27-2015 at 7:00 pm

Does the evil sounding phenomenon known as Dark Silicon create a big opportunity for FPGA vendors as was predicted recently by Pacific Crest Securities? John Vinh posits that using multiple cores as a method of scaling throughput is flattening out, and the use of FPGA’s to perform computation can help off-load and thus overcome… Read More