While listening to the Intel and AMD conference calls last week I was reminded of the ATI acquisition by AMD and the painfully long cultural assimilation that ensued. The title of this blog could just as easily have been “Custom vs Synthesizable Design Cultures” or “The Real Reason Why AMD is Fabless” because that is closer to how … Read More
Siemens EDA Makes 3D IC Design More Accessible with Early Package Assembly Verification2.5D and 3D ICs present special challenges since…Read More
Webinar: Fine-grained Memory Protection to Prevent RISC-V Cyber AttacksMost organizations are aware of cybercrime attempts such…Read More
Webinar: Samtec and Achronix Expand AI in the Data CenterThe performance demands of data centers continue to…Read More
Don't Settle for Less Than Optimal - Get the Perfect Inductor Every TimeThe meaning of the word “Veloce” is “blazing…Read More
Synopsys is Paving the Way for Success with 112G SerDes and BeyondData communication speeds continue to grow. New encoding…Read More
When is a Million-Year MTBF Too Short?
The reliability metric, Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), is often misunderstood. Use of an MTBF metric generally assumes a random failure process, one that is very infrequent and has no memory of past failures. Such failure modes can occur in System-on-Chip (SoC) designs and include radiation effects, synchronizer malfunctions… Read More
Setting the Record Straight on FD-SOI Costs
I recently published an article on Semiwiki “Is SOI Really Less Expensive”. That article was the result of months of careful research and analysis. I looked at planar FDSOI versus bulk planar, bulk FinFETs and FinFETs on SOI at three different nodes. I took a consistent set of assumptions with respect to the fab used to run the processes,… Read More
Rest in Peace CPUs, Hello FPGAs
FPGAs in many ways are still a bit mysterious to some folk. I was at a high level summit in April, and I realized that many there had no idea what an FPGA was. They knew at least what a CPU was or meant and that their kids talk about GPUs. A good analogy I have for an FPGA when compared to a CPU is something like this. Think of the FPGA and CPU as … Read More
Samsung Foundry Explained!
Rather than watch the World Cup battle for third place, my beautiful wife and I spent last Saturday afternoon at the CASPA Wearables Symposium. The most interesting presentation was from Samsung because it included slides on their foundry offering. In regards to wearables, I still don’t see the ROI I need to buy one, yet. We are getting… Read More
SEMICON Update: 450mm, EUV, FinFET, and More
I spent all of last week at SEMICON West meeting with customers, potential customers, partners and various industry analysts and experts. I was involved in many interesting discussions over the course of the week and I thought I would share some of the more interesting observations:
Alternate Fin Materials Pushed Out
I have for… Read More
New Release of Semulator3D at #semiconwest
One of Coventor’s flagship products is SEMulator3D, and at Semicon West they announced a new version, 2014.100.
SEMulator3D is a powerful 3D semiconductor and MEMS process modeling platform. It uses highly efficient physics-driven voxel modeling technology. It models the physical effects of process steps, which is… Read More
Winds of Change in the Custom Chip Market
The most interesting part of the semiconductor market for me has always been the Custom Chip sector – the FPGA, ASIC and SoC companies where I have spent my entire career. These three segments provide an excellent barometer of the overall state of financial health and technological innovation for the entire High Tech industry, … Read More
eSilicon and IDT Collaborate on Next-generation RapidIO Switches
Earlier in the week, eSilicon and IDT announced a collaboration to accelerate development of next-generation RapidIO switches. These are used to meet the higher performance demands required for new wireless, embedded and computing infrastructures. The two companies will initially work together to develop RapidIO switches… Read More
SemiWiki Big Data Exposed!
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
Application-Specific Lithography: Sense Amplifier and Sub-Wordline Driver Metal Patterning in DRAM