The interconnect technology is one of the unsung heroes of the system-on-chip (SoC) revolution. It’s the on-chip networking fabric that is used to link various IP cores on an SoC floorplan. The technology facilitates links between multiple processors, on-chip memories, hardware accelerators and more. In other words,… Read More





What’s New in Functional Verification Debug
We often think of EDA vendors competing with each other and using proprietary data formats to make it difficult for users to mix and match tools, or even create efficient flows of tools. At the recent DAC event in San Francisco I was pleasantly surprised to hear that two EDA vendors decided to cooperate instead of create incompatible… Read More
Imec’s An Steegen Talks Future Process Technology
I’m an An Steegen groupie. Once or twice a year I see a presentation by her and it is a great summary in a ridiculously short period of time of all the potential upcoming semiconductor technologies. Yesterday was my annual fix at the imec Technology Forum (ITF). Today I got to sit down with her at the conference center.
An is different… Read More
Synopsys Vision on Custom Automation with FinFET
In an overwhelmingly digital world, there is a constant cry about the analog design process being slow, not automated, going at its own pace in the same old fashion, and so on. And, the analog world is not happy with the way it’s getting dragged into imperfect automation so it can be more like the digital world. True, the analog world… Read More
Heard on the Street at ITF
As I said yesterday, I’m at the imec Technology Forum (ITF) in Brussels. So what have I learned from all the people that I’ve interacted with.
There were two press releases announced at a press conference yesterday. The first was that imec was expanding its relationship with Toshiba and Sandisk. This covers bringing… Read More
3 Design Hooks of Atmel MCUs for Connected Cars
In February 2015, BMW reported that it has patched the security flaw which could allow hackers to remotely unlock the doors of more than 2 million BMW, Mini and Rolls-Royce vehicles. Earlier, researchers at ADAC, a German motorist association, had demonstrated how they could intercept communications with BMW’s ConnectedDrive… Read More
Samsung: the Journey to 14nm and 10nm
At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More
A Closer Look at Fab Closures Around the World
Electronics is unusually an evergreen industry where companies make profit, yet end-product prices go down significantly after a brief period of price skimming. A product phases out quite fast (in case of smartphones every 1.5 to 2 years), but still yields big bucks for successful companies in its value-chain. How does this happen?… Read More
Bijan Kiani Talks Synopsys Custom Layout and More
Last week I sat down and talked to Bijan Kiani of Synopsys. He has marketing responsibility for design implementation products at Synopsys spanning digital, custom and analog mixed signal (AMS).
He was born in Iran and after high school he moved to the UK. He got his PhD degree from University of Edinburgh. It turns out that I was doing… Read More
Growth drivers shifting to emerging economies
Global real gross domestic product (GDP) growth in 2015 is expected to be 3.5%, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) April 2015 report. 2015 is a slight acceleration of 0.1 percentage points from 3.4% growth in 2014. The IMF projects 2016 global growth of 3.8%, an acceleration of 0.3 percentage points from 2015. The… Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot