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
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
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?
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
ARM & Cadence IP Partnership for Faster SoC Design
IP vendors always try to create differentiation, especially when designing protocol based IP. You can differentiate by building the most performing controller but you will probably miss the expectation of these customers who don’t search for performance but just compliance to a specific standard. Or the vendor may want to design… Read More
SEMI: All This and Breakfast Too
Are you interested in any of these?
- Internet of Things
- Trends and Forecast for Fabs
- Inflections Points
- Semiconductor CAPEX
- Cost Effective Scaling
- Prospects for 450mm
- Future of EUV
- Mobile Machine Learning
- Robotics/Drones
- Cybersecurity
- Used Equipment Markets
- World Fab Databases
- Free breakfast
No? Then I think you got the wrong… Read More
Webinar: Choosing IP for your next IoT Design
My favorite IoT device is a cycle-computer from CatEyeand it has GPS for tracking my bike routes, and an LCD display that shows me speed, cadence, heart rate and time. After each ride I connect my CatEye device to a USB connector, upload my data to Strava.com, and then see how I’m doing versus other cyclists and my own personal… Read More
Exploring IP You Didn’t Design Yourself
Starvision Pro from Concept Engineering is a bit like one of those Leatherman multi-tools, it has a huge number of different functions, some of them fairly specialized but nonetheless incredibly useful. Many of these functions are unique to Starvision Pro, with nothing else like it on the market. Some new videos, produced by EDA… Read More
Mapping Focus and Dose onto BEOL Fabrication Effects
With today’s ArF based lithography using 193nm wavelength light, we are hard up against the limitations imposed by the Raleigh equation. Numerous clever things have been devised to maximize yield and reduce feature size. These include 2 beam lithography, multiple patterning, immersion litho processes to improve NA, thinner… Read More
FD-SOI Foundry
At the end of last month during ISSCC there was a forum organized by the SOI Consortium. It took place in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel (which, if you have never been there, is famous for converting its old entryway for carriages into an amazing dining room, and for a bar with a huge painting by Maxfield Parrish of the Pied Piper valued… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki