You are currently viewing SemiWiki as a guest which gives you limited access to the site. To view blog comments and experience other SemiWiki features you must be a registered member. Registration is fast, simple, and absolutely free so please,
join our community today!
Blogs have limited wordcount so insert your own generic opening paragraph here about the importance of low power in IC design. Mention IoT and cloud datacenters for extra credit.
It is well-known that the biggest reductions in power come from changes at the architectural level. Tools and process can do some things and since they… Read More
It’s less than four weeks to go at DAC 2015 and the program is final now. So I started investigating new technologies, trends, methodologies, and tools that will be unveiled and discussed in this DAC. In the hindsight of the semiconductor industry over the last year, I see 14nm technologies in the realization stage and 10nm beckoning… Read More
There used to be this thing called the “computer lab”, with glowing rows of terminals connected to a mainframe or minicomputer. Computers required a lot of care and feeding, with massive cooling and power requirements. Microprocessors and personal computers appeared in the 1970s, with much smaller and less expensive machines… Read More
Micrel Inc., one of the oldest chipmakers in Silicon Valley, has been acquired by Chandler, Arizona–based Microchip Technology Inc. for $839 million. A pure-play analog chip house will go to one of the leading microcontroller suppliers after regulatory approval amid the consolidation wave that has engulfed the semiconductor… Read More
In the first part of this article, I talked about some of the key business aspects along with some technical aspects like system performance, functionality, and IP integration that drive the architecture of an SoC for its best optimization and realization in an economic sense. In this part, let’s dive into some more aspects that… Read More
My beautiful wife and I attend the Design Automation Conference together whenever possible. More so now that she is the co-founder and CFO of SemiWiki. It is really nice for her to put a face to the invoices and personally thank our subscribers. Her first DAC was 1985 in Las Vegas. We were married for less than a year so it was like a second… Read More
It was way back in 2001 that Pat Gelsinger, then CTO of Intel, pointed out that if we kept increasing clock rates that chips would have the power density of rocket nozzles and nuclear reactor cores. Ever since then power has been public enemy #1 in chip design. In 2007 Apple announced the iPhone and the application processor inside … Read More
For those who may not know me, here is a brief introduction. I started in the semiconductor business when RCA was still making vacuum tubes and I wrote EDA software before there was an EDA industry. I’ve designed and sold chips and developed, sold and used EDA tools at companies as big as General Electric and as small as seven people.… Read More
Mentor Graphics made a big announcement regarding SOC extraction at their User2User conference in San Jose during April. Before I get to the meat of the announcement, I’d like to reflect back on the early days of Calibre-DRC at Mentor. I was in Sales at Mentor around 1999, and Calibre-DRC was the new kid on the block. We had to go convince… Read More
The media landscape is changing faster than ever before. I don’t really think we have more news to cover but there sure are more people covering it and even more news outlets are coming. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, SnapChat, etc… news will be coming at us faster and from more directions than ever before. It’s not a bad thing but there… Read More
Memory Innovation at the Edge: Power Efficiency Meets Green Manufacturing