Electro Static Discharge (ESD) is a fact of life for IC designs and has been ever since electronics were first created and then started failing because of sudden, large currents flowing through the design caused by human, processing or machine contact. It’s just too expensive to layout an IC today, fabricate it, test for … Read More
How Much Power to Allocate to IoT Connectivity?
Ensigma is in fact the low-power radio processing unit (RPU) architecture, completing Imagination Technologies (IMG) port-folio, the well-known graphic processing unit (GPU) PowerVR family and MIPS CPU core products. If we take a look at the block diagram “Ensigma Series4 Explorer RPU”, we can easily identifies the Radio … Read More
EUV Pellicles
Shakespeare reckoned that a man went through seven stages in his life.All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.
Well, an EUV mask seems to only go through three main stages:
[LIST=1]
Then, Python walked in for verification
Go ahead – type “open source” into the SemiWiki search box. Lots of recent articles on the IoT, not so many on EDA tools. Change takes a while. It has only been about five years since the Big Three plus Aldec sat down at the same table to work on UVM. Since then, Aldec has also gotten behind OS-VVM, and is now linked to a relatively new open… Read More
Pizza con Questa
Last week I went to a lunch and learn at Mentor about their Questa formal product given by Kurt Takara. Like everyone else these days, Questa is packaged as a number of Apps for doing different tasks. Formal verification is different from other EDA tools in that different approaches can be used for different sub-tasks. There are three… Read More
Wipe that smile off your device
Privacy is a tough enough question when using a device – but what about when we’re done with it? In a world of two year service agreements with device upgrades and things being attached to long-life property like cars and homes, your data could fall into the hands of the next owner way too easily.
“Oh, it’s OK, I wiped the phone with a factory… Read More
How to Trim Automotive Sensor?
The electronic content in automotive is exploding, the market for automotive electronics systems is expected to grow from $170 billion in 2011 to $266 billion by 2016 (Strategy Analytics). When you seat in a brand new car, you immediately see the difference with a ten or even five years old vehicle, as you can exercise MP3 music readers,… Read More
High Tech Headwinds and Project/People Management
In previous posts, we discussed the growing set of challenges and threats faced by the semiconductor industry. From saturating & stagnant systems markets to the gears starting to seize up in that engine of growth we’ve been calling Moore’s Law, chip revenues are – with the exception of memory price boosts from supply… Read More
Enterprise IP Management – A Whole New Gamut in Semiconductor Space
The world of IPs in the semiconductor landscape has completely changed the semiconductor design scenario, specifically the fabless design space. Today IPs are key components of any large semiconductor design, in the same way as auto ancillaries in auto design. It’s just the beginning, in the days to come we will see SoCs just as… Read More
Realibrium.com: EDA for Real-estate
Everyone in EDA is really smart. People who leave EDA and go and work in other industries, especially people who left in the late 1990s for internet startups, notice that this is not true elsewhere. Not that there aren’t smart people in internet startups, just that not everyone is. EDA is an industry where you need a master’s… Read More
Weebit Nano Brings ReRAM Benefits to the Automotive Market