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Vertical NAND Flash

Vertical NAND Flash
by Paul McLellan on 03-23-2015 at 7:00 am

You may know that up until now NAND flash has been a planar technology. But just as with SoC processes where we have had to go vertical to FinFETs, NAND flash has reached the limitations of scaling in the 20nm nodes and is also going vertical. It is not just a lithography issue but there are also reliability and voltage scaling issues.… Read More


Apple’s Ax Chronicle

Apple’s Ax Chronicle
by Majeed Ahmad on 03-22-2015 at 7:00 pm

In April 2008, Apple baffled the semiconductor industry by acquiring the system-on-chip (SoC) pioneer PA Semi for US$278 million. The acquisition, took place at the height of the iPhone fever, left the technology and trade media with an endless suite of guessing games. In the end, it was just about Apple’s quest for having… Read More


Intel and the Intel-of-Things

Intel and the Intel-of-Things
by Tom Simon on 03-22-2015 at 1:00 pm

When I joined Calma in 1982, Intel was a small company making microprocessor chips in a crowded marketplace. They had scored big with IBM who was using their 8088 in the very first personal computer. Wind River was a hatchling with David Wilner and Jerry Fiddler working out of a rented warehouse in Berkeley – I know, I hung out… Read More


Wow: Synopsys v. Mentor Update!

Wow: Synopsys v. Mentor Update!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-22-2015 at 7:00 am

As a reminder, the Synopsys v. Mentor drama started when Synopsys filed a Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief on the same day (September 27, 2012) as they entered into an agreement to acquire emulation provider EVE (ZeBu emulator systems), which competes with Mentor’s Veloce family of emulators. Apparently, upon… Read More


SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA

SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-21-2015 at 7:00 am

If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked… Read More


Silvaco Swallows Invarian

Silvaco Swallows Invarian
by admin on 03-20-2015 at 7:00 am

Yesterday, Silvaco announced that it has acquired Invarian Inc. Details of the transaction were not disclosed.

Who is Invarian? They are a recognized leader in block-level to full-chip sign-off analysis for complex, high-performance ICs. Their unique methodology utilizes a parallel architecture and concurrent power-voltage-thermal… Read More


Closure: Kilopass v. Sidense

Closure: Kilopass v. Sidense
by Daniel Nenni on 03-19-2015 at 11:00 pm

The long running legal action between the top two NVM IP companies is now finished after close to five years of lawyering. By the way, I write about this stuff in hopes of limiting the future earning power of lawyers that prey on our R&D budgets. This one is significant because Kilopass was not successful in a patent infringement… Read More


Full Spectrum Analog FastSPICE Useful for RF Designs on Bulk CMOS

Full Spectrum Analog FastSPICE Useful for RF Designs on Bulk CMOS
by Tom Simon on 03-19-2015 at 1:00 pm

It has been about a year since the acquisition of Berkeley Design Automation by Mentor Graphics. Berkeley was doing quite well in the somewhat crowded SPICE simulator market. In many respects they broke new ground for high speed and accurate SPICE simulators. Since the acquisition we know that former Berkeley executives are now… Read More


SystemC Co-Simulation of NoCs and IP Blocks

SystemC Co-Simulation of NoCs and IP Blocks
by Paul McLellan on 03-19-2015 at 7:00 am

Verification in general suffers from a couple of fundamental problems. Availability of models and performance of different levels of representation.

The first problem, availability of models, is that you would like to start verification as soon as possible but all the representations are not ready early enough. Obviously … Read More


TSMC ♥ UMC?

TSMC ♥ UMC?
by Daniel Nenni on 03-18-2015 at 8:00 pm

The relationship between TSMC and UMC is one of the more interesting ones in the fabless semiconductor ecosystem in my opinion. Both are headquartered in Hsinchu Taiwan and it is very hard to visit one company without seeing the other as they have facilities right across the street from each other. They also share humble beginnings… Read More