Webinar 800x100 (1)

Power and Thermal Analysis of Data Center and Server ICs

Power and Thermal Analysis of Data Center and Server ICs
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2014 at 4:00 pm

The server market is a diverse, yet standardized market. The ICs and components designed and manufactured in final assemblies must meet form factor requirements for rack mount and blades. The form factor enclosures and the component placement dictate the thermal-mechanical properties and hence the thermal cooling limits … Read More


TCAD to SPICE Simulation of Power Devices

TCAD to SPICE Simulation of Power Devices
by Daniel Payne on 08-31-2014 at 1:30 pm

The periodic table shows that Silicon (Si) is in a column along with other elements like Carbon (C) and Germanium (Ge). With so much emphasis on Silicon, you’d think that the other semiconductor materials have been neglected a bit.

Silicon is a wonderful material and most of our consumer electronics and handheld devices … Read More


Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet of (Silicon) Things

Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet of (Silicon) Things
by Paul McLellan on 08-31-2014 at 7:01 am

Next week, eSilicon are kicking off a very widespread survey to measure some important semiconductor design and manufacturing challenges. Their goal is to measure customer sentiment regarding how Big Data, the Cloud and the Internet can impact these challenges. But here’s a secret, the survey is already live and you can… Read More


Webinar: Collaboration Within Dispersed Design Teams

Webinar: Collaboration Within Dispersed Design Teams
by Daniel Nenni on 08-30-2014 at 7:00 am

In the face of shrinking time-to-market windows, semiconductor companies are aggressively vying with each other to emerge with new or variants of existing ICs and SoCs to gain market share. The growth of the mobile market –wireless, networking, storage, and computing – as well as new areas such as the Internet of things (IoT) and… Read More


Assertion Synthesis: From Startup to Mainstream

Assertion Synthesis: From Startup to Mainstream
by Daniel Payne on 08-30-2014 at 7:00 am

In college many of us dreamed of starting up our own company by offering something new that has never been done before. Today I spoke by phone with Yunshan Zhuin Shanghai, and he has actually lived out this scenario by founding NextOp in 2006, then getting that company acquired by Atrentain 2012. The new capability that NextOp created… Read More


Transistor-level Sizing Optimization

Transistor-level Sizing Optimization
by Daniel Payne on 08-29-2014 at 4:00 pm

RTL designers know that their code gets transformed into gates and cells by using a logic synthesis tool, however these gates and cells are further comprised of transistors and sometimes you really need to optimize the transistor sizing to reach power, performance and area goals. I’ve done transistor-level IC design before,… Read More


FinFET Design for Power, Noise and Reliability

FinFET Design for Power, Noise and Reliability
by Daniel Payne on 08-29-2014 at 4:00 pm

IC designers have been running analysis tools for power, noise and reliability for many years now, so what is new when you start using FinFET transistors instead of planar transistors? Calvin Chow from ANSYS (Apache Design) presented on this topic earlier in the summer through a 33 minutewebinar that has been archived. There is… Read More


Improving Complex System Design

Improving Complex System Design
by Paul McLellan on 08-29-2014 at 7:01 am

Next week Mike Jensen of Mentor will present a webinar Improving Complex System Design Reliability and Robustness. The webinar will be presented live twice and presumably available for replay soon after, as is usually the case:

  • September 4th 6.00-6.45am pacific (9pm in Asia, 3pm in most of Europe)
  • September 4th 10.00-10.45am
Read More

New details on Altera network-on-FPGA

New details on Altera network-on-FPGA
by Don Dingee on 08-28-2014 at 4:00 pm

Advantages to using NoCs in SoC design are well documented: reduced routing congestion, better performance than crossbars, improved optimization and reuse of IP, strategies for system power management, and so on. What happens when NoCs move into FPGAs, or more accurately the SoC variant combining ARM cores with programmable… Read More


Granite River Labs and TSMC Expand Agreement

Granite River Labs and TSMC Expand Agreement
by Paul McLellan on 08-28-2014 at 7:01 am

For several years now, TSMC has run increasingly sophisticated IP validation. Ramping a new process as a foundry requires a number of things to all come together almost simultaneously: the process, of course, and some designs to run and start to recover the huge capital investment a modern fab entails. With many SoCs having over… Read More