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HiSilicon’s Experience with Synopsys ICC2

HiSilicon’s Experience with Synopsys ICC2
by Daniel Nenni on 11-11-2015 at 4:00 pm

At TSMC’s OIP Symposium last month, Zhe (Jared) Lui of HiSilicon presented their experiences with Synopsys’ ICC2 physical design suite.

Jared started by giving an overview of Huawei and HiSilicon. HiSilicon is the semiconductor arm of Huawei. I assume everyone knows who Huawei is. To a first approximation they … Read More


It’s All about Packaging — In this Material World, Who Is Your Partner?

It’s All about Packaging — In this Material World, Who Is Your Partner?
by Deborah GeigerSEMI on 11-11-2015 at 3:20 pm

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By Dr. Dan Tracy, senior director, Industry Research and Statistics, SEMI

With the recent release of Apple’s 6s and the form factors of internet-enabled mobile devices and the emergence of the IoT (Internet of Things), advanced packaging is clearly the enabling technology providing solutions for mobile applications and forRead More


28nm FD-SOI: A Unique Sweet Spot Poised to Grow

28nm FD-SOI: A Unique Sweet Spot Poised to Grow
by Pawan Fangaria on 11-11-2015 at 12:00 pm

I have been silently watching STMicroelectronics pursuing FD-SOI technology since quite a few years. FinFET was anyway getting more attention in the semiconductor industry because of several factors involved. But from a technology as well as economic perspective there are many plus points with FD-SOI. I remember my debate,… Read More


GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant

GlobalFoundries Visit – Part 2 – Waking the Sleeping Giant
by Scotten Jones on 11-11-2015 at 8:00 am

In part one of this blog I described a visit to GlobalFoundries (GF) Fab 8 site in Malta New York by Daniel Nenni and myself. In this part 2 of the blog, I will describe the second day of our trip when we visited Fab 9 in Burlington Vermont. Before we got to Burlington I thought it would likely be a letdown after seeing the state-of-the-art… Read More


64-bit for the masses with Cortex-A35

64-bit for the masses with Cortex-A35
by Don Dingee on 11-10-2015 at 12:00 pm

It has been four years since the announcement of the ARMv8 instruction set, three years since the launch of the ARM Cortex-A57 and Cortex-A53 cores, and two years since the Apple A7 with its “Cyclone” core blew away any misunderstanding of 64-bit as being just for servers.

There is, however, still this idea that 64-bit is only for … Read More


Verification with Tcl for what? – part 2

Verification with Tcl for what? – part 2
by Anatoly Myshkin on 11-10-2015 at 7:00 am

In Orion Bytes we use Tcl both for the internal research, product and different verification services. We use also SystemVerilog UVM and Python based Cocotb for different approaches. I think it’s no need to deep into the SystemVerilog and UVM principles here – today’s main verification fashion is well described through… Read More


Real Men Use ASIC

Real Men Use ASIC
by Bernard Murphy on 11-09-2015 at 4:00 pm

As we watch the gravitational collapse of the semiconductor industry, it becomes increasingly obvious that the tech zeitgeist, with investment in close lockstep, is squarely centered on complete solutions, not enabling technologies. That this seems unfair (they couldn’t do it without us, and what we do is really, really hard)… Read More


Automobiles and the DMCA

Automobiles and the DMCA
by Chan Lieu on 11-09-2015 at 12:00 pm

When you drive a car off the dealer’s lot, you own the whole vehicle, right? For decades, car owners have popped the hood and crawled under the car to do their own maintenance; and for those mechanically inclined, even make modifications to improve performance or handling. However, in an era where a car is increasingly controlled… Read More


Forget about ThunderBolt, USB Type C is here!

Forget about ThunderBolt, USB Type C is here!
by Eric Esteve on 11-09-2015 at 7:00 am

At the early days of Semiwiki (March 2011), I wrote about ThunderBolt, predicting low market adoption of the protocol, for various reasons. One of these reasons was the cost associated with ThunderBolt integration by the OEM. Even if the protocol (associating PCI Express and DisplayPort) was offering better data bandwidth than… Read More


A moment of IoT silence before we disrupt

A moment of IoT silence before we disrupt
by Don Dingee on 11-08-2015 at 12:00 pm

As I sat down in the SEMI Arizona Chapter breakfast meeting a few weeks ago, a moment of semiconductor history flew right before my eyes before the IoT sessions started.

We were seated in the cafeteria of Freescale Building 94 on Elliot Road in Tempe, a place I’d been many times before, except this time may have been the last. NXP is consolidating… Read More