Paul McLellan and I attended the 2014 Embedded Vision Summit in Silicon Valley this week. The most interesting session for me was on the new Google car that was announced earlier in the week. But first, to set the stage, let’s look at a new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that shows motor vehicle… Read More
Sidense NVM IP clears TSMC9000 at 28nm
Maybe I’ve spent too many years whiffing solder flux fumes and absorbing doses of X-band radiation in anechoic chambers, but I’m a firm believer in the axiom: “Give me enough engineers, and I can get 10 of anything to work right, once.” We have to make this … fit into this … using only this stuff … is what legends are made of.… Read More
SemiWiki Exceeds One Million Users!
SemiWiki was launched on January 1[SUP]st[/SUP] 2011 and according to Google Analytics we have officially exceeded one million users (unique visitors). I really don’t know what to say but, WOW, that is a LOT of people reading SemiWiki articles, wikis, and forums (there are now 13,464 posts on SemiWiki).
According to Alexa.com… Read More
TSMC: Keynote, OIP, 20nm, 16nm, panels, and more #51DAC
What is TSMC doing at DAC?
The biggest event is presumably Cliff Hou’s DAC keynote on Monday at 3.25pm Industry Opportunities in the Sub-10nm Era. And he also wrote the foreword to Fabless, the book that Dan Nenni and I have written and where you can get a signed copy on Tuesday evening at the reception.
There is an IP workshop … Read More
How About a Quality-Aware IP Design Flow
In the EDA world we use hyphens quite often to describe our technical approaches, like: DFM-aware, Power-aware, Variation-aware. I just read a white papertoday on the topic of Quality-Aware IP Design Flows, written by Fractal Technologies. If your group creates IP or re-uses IP, then there’s always the question about … Read More
Samsung Voice of the Body
I just back from Samsung’s big announcement held at the SFJazz center (very conveniently 15 minutes walk from my place). They put a stake in the ground about their program at the intersection of medicine and health and technology. They had said in advance that they would not announce any new hardware but in fact they did…although… Read More
RedHawk Excels – Customers Endorse
Since a few years, I have been following up Ansys Apachetools for semiconductor design, verification and sign-off. RedHawk is the most prominent platform of tools from Ansys, specifically for Power, Noise and Reliability Sign-off. It has witnessed many open endorsements from several of Ansyscustomers through open presentations,… Read More
Understanding QoR in FPGA synthesis
We’ve all heard this claim: “Our FPGA synthesis tool produces better quality of results (QoR).” If you’re just hoping for a tool to do that automagically, you’re probably doing it wrong. Getting better QoR depends on understanding what an FPGA synthesis tool is capable of, and how to leverage what it tells you.… Read More
DRM2PDK: From design rule manual to process design kit
Exactly a year ago Sage Design Automation launched its revolutionary iDRM product, enabling for the first time to graphically capture design rules and compile them into checks automatically – no programming required. Using the graphical design rule editor, users could draw the layout topology that describes the design… Read More
Two New ESL Tools for Power and Thermal at DAC
Gary Smith published a list of what to see at DAC, and I noticed that he listed DOCEA Power in a category of ESL Thermal. I’ll be meeting the DOCEA engineers on Wednesday at DAC to learn more about their two newest ESL products:
- Thermal Profiler
- Power Intelligence
In general DOCEA Power tools allow you to manage power and thermal… Read More
Real men have fabs!