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SEMICON West 2014 Event Calendar

SEMICON West 2014 Event Calendar
by Daniel Nenni on 06-13-2014 at 8:00 am

SEMICON West is the flagship annual event for the global microelectronics industry. It is the premier event for the display of new products and technologies for microelectronics design and manufacturing, featuring technologies from across the microelectronics supply chain, from electronic design automation, to device … Read More


GDS II Online for TSMC

GDS II Online for TSMC
by Paul McLellan on 06-12-2014 at 4:00 pm

I just watched an interesting video of a demonstration at DAC of the eSilicon GDS II online quote for TSMC. Actually, it wasn’t so much as a demonstration as an interactive use of the quote tool using data supplied by a member of the audience.

The quote system works for TSMC processes from 28nm up to 350nm. The design the audience… Read More


IP Accelerated (Bye Bye EDA 360)

IP Accelerated (Bye Bye EDA 360)
by Eric Esteve on 06-12-2014 at 9:53 am

Synopsys has been extremely active, during the last 10 years, not only launching new IP products every year, but also running an ambitious acquisition strategy, with no less than 8 acquisitions. Cascade acquisition bring PCI Express (controller only), when Accelerant bring SerDes (the earth of any PHY IP). The MIPS/Chipidea… Read More


ATopTech’s Legal Woes Continue!

ATopTech’s Legal Woes Continue!
by Daniel Nenni on 06-11-2014 at 8:00 pm

It was a bad sign when an EDA company solicited John Cooley’s help in their legal challenge: See Did Atoptech Just Astroturf Synopsys? Gabe Moretti also did an article: John Cooley Barrister Chastises Synopsys | Gabe on EDA. An even worse sign is when your legal team gets disqualified, especially when that legal team is the top EDA… Read More


MEMS Update from DAC

MEMS Update from DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-11-2014 at 11:32 am

DAC has an interesting mix of vendors each year, and some of them are outside of the expected digital, analog or IP space. Last Tuesday at DAC I visited a company called Coventor that has three product lines:

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Softly Defined Networks

Softly Defined Networks
by Paul McLellan on 06-11-2014 at 4:26 am

Software defined networks were a technique developed around 6 years ago. The original structure of IP based network scaled by using additional routers that would forward packets based on partial information about the network topology. Inside each router was a dataplane, where the packets themselves flowed through, and a control… Read More


CEVA Webinar: DSP solution for mobile and wearable devices

CEVA Webinar: DSP solution for mobile and wearable devices
by Eric Esteve on 06-10-2014 at 11:10 am

CEVA is well known as DSP IP core provider for Wireless Application Processor, but the Teak-Lite IP family is also very successful for Audio application, with more than 3 billion Audio IC shipped to date. CEVA is proposing a webinar addressing two of the most important IoT needs, a DSP based Audio implementation and CEVA-Bluetooth… Read More


Atmel SMART

Atmel SMART
by Paul McLellan on 06-09-2014 at 6:00 pm

I talked last week about the internet of things (IoT) panel I attended at DAC. One thing that is clear is that IoT is not really a market on its own, but nonetheless the fact that billions of edge-node devices are going to be connected to the internet is a real trend. One company that takes IoT very seriously is Atmel, since they have an … Read More


Mobile: China Rising

Mobile: China Rising
by Paul McLellan on 06-09-2014 at 3:00 pm

The mobile numbers for Q1 are now published. At #1 as always is Samsung, who shipped 86M phones for 30% market share. At #2, with almost half as much volume, is Apple who shipped 44M phones. Round here in silicon valley pretty much everyone has either a Samsung Galaxy or an iPhone so you don’t get any sense of who the other major … Read More


An Update on Calibre at DAC

An Update on Calibre at DAC
by Daniel Payne on 06-09-2014 at 12:00 pm

Even though I live just 7 miles away from the Mentor Graphics corporate office in Oregon, I visited their DAC suite in San Francisco last week to get an update on Calibrefrom Michael White. The Calibre tools are used during IC verification and sign-off by performing DRC (Design Rule Checking) and LVS (Layout Versus Schematic).… Read More