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FinFET: The Miller’s Tale

FinFET: The Miller’s Tale
by Paul McLellan on 05-27-2015 at 7:00 am

In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the second of the tales told by the pilgrims is The Miller’s Tale. Since this is a family blog, I’ll leave you to research the tale yourself. But FinFETs hide another Miller’s Tale, due to Miller capacitance, sometimes called the Miller effect. This is significant since in FinFET designs Miller capacitance… Read More


Synopsys Earnings Call

Synopsys Earnings Call
by Paul McLellan on 05-27-2015 at 12:00 am

Synopsys had their earnings announcement and call last week. They were good. In Aart’s own words:I’m happy to report that our second quarter results were very strong and solidify our outlook for the full year. We delivered revenue of $557 million, non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.68 and $155 million in operation cash flow.Read More


Why does Apple do business with Samsung?

Why does Apple do business with Samsung?
by Daniel Nenni on 05-26-2015 at 10:00 pm

The Apple and Samsung relationship is an interesting one. On one hand they have co-developed some of the most innovative products on the market today (iPod, iPhone, iPad, iWatch) yet they are fierce competitors in the mobile market. Some call this type of business relationship “frenemies” others refer to the old Italian proverb… Read More


Taking a Leap Forward to Prototype Billion Gate Designs

Taking a Leap Forward to Prototype Billion Gate Designs
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-26-2015 at 12:00 pm

It’s very common these days to hear about a billion gates SoC, but not without a huge design and verification effort and investment of resources. A complete verification of such an SoC needs several verification steps including software and hardware based methodologies that often are not sufficient to cover the whole SoC. In order… Read More


How Good Is Your Library? Are You Sure?

How Good Is Your Library? Are You Sure?
by Paul McLellan on 05-26-2015 at 7:00 am

 

One task that is not very exciting but is critical is that of library quality assurance. Many design groups have created their own procedures, often having been burned in the past, to ensure that the libraries that they use are good. Failure to do so has resulted in:… Read More


How to design silicon photonics–take this class!

How to design silicon photonics–take this class!
by Beth Martin on 05-25-2015 at 9:30 pm

Silicon Photonics is the hottest prospect for blazing fast communication between chips in servers, data centers, and supercomputers.

By using light instead of electrical signals, it promise to usher in a new standard of high performance, low power devices while extending the use of more mature process nodes, helping to reduce… Read More


CEVA DSPs and the Tale of Two Chip Underdogs from China

CEVA DSPs and the Tale of Two Chip Underdogs from China
by Majeed Ahmad on 05-25-2015 at 1:30 pm

Leadcore Technology Co. Ltd, a subsidiary of Datang Group, is a silicon success story from China. It recently made waves by snatching the baseband socket from Qualcomm in Xiaomi’s sub-$100 LTE smartphone Redmi 2A. Leadcore’s L1860C chipset included quad-core 1.5GHz CPU and Mali-T628MP2 GPU from ARM and LTE modem… Read More


How Good is Your DRC Deck?

How Good is Your DRC Deck?
by Daniel Nenni on 05-24-2015 at 4:30 pm

Design Rule Check (DRC) is the #1 foundry sign-off check. Fabless companies receive the DRC deck from the foundry; it’s a file comprising thousands of commands in a proprietary checker language for a specific DRC tool. In advanced technologies such a deck executes tens of thousands of geometric operations on the physical… Read More


Accelerate Modern PCB Design and Manufacturing

Accelerate Modern PCB Design and Manufacturing
by Pawan Fangaria on 05-24-2015 at 12:00 pm

In modern electronic industry PCBs are required to accommodate highly dense circuits with large number of components and complex routing spaces. While the complexity is increasing, the time-to-market is decreasing. In such a scenario, there is no other option than to reduce the design time by employing innovative editing options… Read More


How to Push Mobile to Use PCI Express?

How to Push Mobile to Use PCI Express?
by Eric Esteve on 05-24-2015 at 7:00 am

By offering low-power PCI Express PHY solution for mobile application! To make it clear, we are not talking about Mobile Express (M-PCIe), but clearly about PCI Express protocol, including a PCIe Controller and a PCIe PHY. Initially developed to support internal connection between the CPU and the GPU in a PC, the technology has… Read More