‘Laughing Buddha’ is eternal, but for semiconductor industry, I must say it’s ‘laughing Moore’. Moore made a predictive hypothesis and the whole world is inclined to let that continue, eternally? When we were at 28nm, we weren’t hoping to go beyond 20/22nm; voices like ‘Moore’s law is dead’ started emerging. Today, we are already… Read More
Altair SimLab: Tackling 3D IC Multiphysics Challenges for Scalable ECAD ModelingThe semiconductor industry is rapidly moving beyond traditional…Read More
AI Booming is Fueling Interface IP 23.5% YoY GrowthAI explosion is clearly driving semi-industry since 2020.…Read More
Arteris Adds Functional Safety to NoC
Arteris Inc.has joined hands with Yogitech S.p.A. to help automotive system-on-chip (SoC) designers meet the required functional safety metrics and obtain the ISO 26262 certification for automotive safety integrity levels (ASIL) in the least possible time.
Arteris—which provides network-on-chip (NoC) interconnect IP… Read More
Mobile 2014 and the Future
The numbers are in now and so we can look at the top suppliers into the mobile market for 2014, and then a look out to what the future might bring. Before getting to the companies it is worth looking just how dominant the Chinese market is, at 32% of the entire world market compared to, for example, US’s 9%. China Mobile alone has … Read More
Physically Aware DFT Improves PPA
Introducing on-chip test circuitry has become a necessary criteria for an ASIC’s post manufacture testability. The test circuitry is usually referred as DFT (Design-for-Test) circuit. A typical methodology for introducing DFT circuit in a design is to replace usual flip-flops with special types of flip-flops called ‘scan… Read More
Secure Processor for IoT
In my last blog “Processor for IoT” I have discussed security as one of the key requirements for processor used in IoT devices. In this blog we will analyze different method of hacking and some techniques which can be used to prevent those security breaches.
One of the common ways of attack is to probe address and data … Read More
ARM 2014 Results: 12 Billion Cores
Last week was the ARM earnings call, giving the Q4 results and a summary of 2014. 12B chips containing ARM processors were shipped last year which has meant that they have grown in all their major end-markets: mobile, embedded intelligence, and enterprise infrastructure. Almost half of those 12B chips were in mobile, around 5.6B.… Read More
Greetings from Digitopia!
When it comes to the privacy and security of data, what does the future hold for consumers, companies and governments?
A tremendously interesting document, called “Alternate Worlds,” was published by the U.S. National Intelligence Council. It’s a serious document that not only examines four different alternatives of what … Read More
AMAT Earnings Call: Next Generation FinFETs?
The Applied Materials earnings call was last week. As usual I”m not all that interested in the financial details of the quarter and I’m certainly not the person to pick whether the stock is going to go up or down in the immediate future. However, there is always interesting information to be gleaned from the semiconductor… Read More
TSMC 20nm Essentially Worthless?
It happens at every process node, professional journalists write that something is broken and blames TSMC like a worn out record. To be fair they are not semiconductor professionals with access to the fabless semiconductor rank and file and are easily manipulated which is what happened again at 20nm. Remember when NVIDIA suggested… Read More
More Test Points are Better
I got really involved in testability back at CrossCheck in the 1990’s when they designed a way for Gate Arrays to have 100% observability without any Design For Test (DFT) requirements on designers. The Japanese Gate Array companies loved this approach and their customers enjoyed the highest test coverage without being… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki