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All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful

All Models Are Wrong, Some Are Useful
by Paul McLellan on 09-15-2015 at 7:00 am

“All models are wrong, some are useful.” This remark is attributed to the statistician George Box who used it as the section heading in a paper published in 1976.

Just for fun I looked up a few semiconductor statistics from 1976. Total capital spending was $238M in Japan and $306M in US and…that’s it, there was nobody else back then … Read More


Mongoose: The Making of Samsung’s Custom CPU Core

Mongoose: The Making of Samsung’s Custom CPU Core
by Majeed Ahmad on 09-14-2015 at 4:00 pm

Samsung is seemingly ready to move to a new milestone in its brief but exciting system-on-chip (SoC) history: a custom CPU core codenamed Mongoose. It’s going to be based on ARMv8 instruction set and is expected to outperform the Exynos 7420 application processor that Samsung unveiled this year. There are some media reports… Read More


Thermal Reliability and Power Integrity for IC Design

Thermal Reliability and Power Integrity for IC Design
by Daniel Payne on 09-14-2015 at 12:00 pm

When I designed DRAM chips at Intel back in the 1970’s we didn’t really know what the die temperature would be before taping out silicon, instead we waited for packaged parts to come back and then did our thermal measurements. IC designers today don’t have that luxury of taping out their new SoC without having … Read More


Replacing the British Museum Algorithm

Replacing the British Museum Algorithm
by Paul McLellan on 09-14-2015 at 7:00 am

In principle, one way to address variation is to do simulations at lots of PVT corners. In practice, most of this simulation is wasted since it adds no new information, and even so, important corners will get missed. This is what Sifuei Ku of Microsemi calls the British Museum Algorithm. You walk everywhere. And if you don’t walk to… Read More


FDSOI As a Multi-Node Platform

FDSOI As a Multi-Node Platform
by khaki on 09-13-2015 at 12:00 pm

One of the main criticisms of the FDSOI technology has been that it is a one-node solution at best and is not scalable to the future. Such arguments are typically based on the “gate-length-scaling” assumptions which do not capture the past and current trends of the CMOS technology as I discussed in my earlier post. Back in the early… Read More


Apple’s Butterfly Effect?

Apple’s Butterfly Effect?
by Daniel Nenni on 09-13-2015 at 7:00 am

The Butterfly Effect (chaos theory) describes how small changes to complex systems can result in large unforeseen consequences over time. The Apple Effect describes how a once struggling computer company completely disrupted a dozen different industries including semiconductors. Apple is now the largest and most influential… Read More


eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon

eSilicon Truly Puts the ‘e’ in Silicon
by Paul McLellan on 09-12-2015 at 7:00 am

eSilicon have a new website. Companies update their websites regularly, so why is this news? Well, eSilicon increasingly does their business on the web. They are not like Facebook, say, where their business is entirely web-based, there is a physical business behind them. So they are more like Lyft for chips. Obviously Lyft requires… Read More


Moving up Verification to Scenario Driven Methodology

Moving up Verification to Scenario Driven Methodology
by Pawan Fangaria on 09-11-2015 at 12:00 pm

Verification complexity and volume has always been on the rise, taking significant amount of time, human, and compute resources. There are multiple techniques such as simulation, emulation, FPGA prototyping, formal verification, post-silicon testing, and so on which gain prominence in different situations and at different… Read More


IoT – The Future?

IoT – The Future?
by dineshsmca on 09-11-2015 at 7:00 am

I was hesitating to write on this topic as I thought I was not a subject matter expert on IoT. Nevertheless, I understood that if you’ve a penchant to understand what’s happening around you and stretch a bit to peek into the future then you can comfortably predict what’s going to be the emergent technology that’s… Read More


Intel – "Inside" good markets, outside bad- Huge potential in Memory & Photonics

Intel – "Inside" good markets, outside bad- Huge potential in Memory & Photonics
by Robert Maire on 09-11-2015 at 2:00 am

Intel’s lack of exposure to handsets/China is now a positive rather than a negative

Intel’s strength in “cloud” & servers avoids much consumer weakness in China & developing Markets

Crosspoint has huge upside- Coupled with Photonics it fortifies Intel server dominance

The shoe is on the otherRead More