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SemiWiki Big Data Exposed!

SemiWiki Big Data Exposed!
by Daniel Nenni on 07-17-2014 at 7:00 pm

You will be hard pressed to attend a conference and NOT hear the term Big Data these days. What is Big Data? One example is the data SemiWiki has collected over the past 3.5 years while more than one million users have passed through our site. My summer project, with my daughter the math major, is to harness this massive pile of data and… Read More


Palladium’s Little Brother Protium

Palladium’s Little Brother Protium
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2014 at 8:00 am

Today, Cadence announced Protium, a new FPGA prototyping platform for software development. During development of an SoC, the most appropriate methodology changes. In the early days, developing RTL, the primary tool is simulation. Then, as the blocks get bigger or as the whole chip starts to come together, typically simulation… Read More


Intel Second Quarter Results

Intel Second Quarter Results
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 4:03 pm

Intel announced their quarterly results earlier this week. Their mainline microprocessor business is doing well, especially the highest performance segments for servers, datacenters and cloud computing. Broken down by segment the numbers come out like this:

  • PC Client Group revenue of $8.7 billion, up 9 percent sequentially
Read More

Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing

Catching IC Manufacturing Defects With Slack-Based Transition Delay Testing
by Daniel Payne on 07-16-2014 at 3:00 pm

Test engineers are often the unsung heroes in the semiconductor world, because they have the tough job of deciding if each IC is good or bad, while taking the least amount of time on a tester and ensuring that the tests are actually finding and uncovering all manufacturing and process variation defects. Simple stuck-at fault models… Read More


Andes Plays an ACE

Andes Plays an ACE
by Paul McLellan on 07-16-2014 at 9:01 am

There is a perception that ARM is the only microprocessor game in town due to their strong position in many markets, especially mobile. In areas where the instruction set shows through, then this is probably true. There is no rush to build smartphones where the application processor is something else. But even in a phone there are… Read More


Thread is why Nest has extra 802.15.4 goodies

Thread is why Nest has extra 802.15.4 goodies
by Don Dingee on 07-15-2014 at 4:00 pm

From last week: “Chipmakers can’t afford to wait on the sidelines, hoping their standard fare gets picked up and fits in with one of these [#IoT]teams.” This week, it’s ARM, Freescale, and Silicon Labs joining with Google and others on Thread. Yet another consortium? A lot more to this story.… Read More


Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET

Keywords: FD-SOI, Cost, FinFET
by Eric Esteve on 07-15-2014 at 4:21 am

How to synthesize a pretty good article Is SOI Really Less Expensive, and even more important the impressive amount of comments (56) generated? Let’s start with the initial article. Pretty good, but slightly biased, when you carefully dissect it, like I did in one of the comments (you can find it in-extenso at the end of this post).… Read More


Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction

Cadence Announces Quantus Next Generation Extraction
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 pm

Today Cadence announced their next generation extraction solution called Quantus QRC. Actually they are technically announcing it tomorrow, since it is being announced at CDNLive in Korea where it is already Tuesday morning.

As with the other recently announced tools that end in -us, Tempus (timing signoff) and Voltus (power… Read More


EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest

EUV and DSA from Imec and #semiconwest
by Paul McLellan on 07-14-2014 at 7:00 am

All the details of how we will build semiconductors going forward depend on whether we have EUV in our arsenal or not. Imec is very close to this since they work closely with ASML (who are about an hour and half’s drive away just outside Eindhoven in the Netherlands). At the imec technology symposium we were given a quick summary… Read More