A Virtual Platform for any kind of design or manufacturing in any discipline of science or engineering (electrical, mechanical, aeronautics etc.) must be able to provide an accurate representation of an actual design/product in a fraction of time and cost it takes to build working prototypes. In the case of semiconductors at … Read More
MIPI IP segment to reach $100M? Yes, …
… in 2019. At that time, the total Interface IP market is expected to weight between $900 million and $1 billion. If we want to understand this IP market segment dynamics, we have to look at protocol based products like USB (from USB 1.0 defined in 1996 at 12 Mbit/s to USB 3.1 supporting 10 Gbps data rate) or PCI Express (from PCIe gen-1… Read More
What is Next for GLOBALFOUNDRIES?
In response to changing industry dynamics, AMD announced in October 2008 a new strategy to focus exclusively on the design phase of semiconductor product development. To achieve that strategy, AMD partnered with Advanced Technology Investment Company (ATIC) of Abu Dhabi to create a new joint venture company designed to become… Read More
Xilinx and Red Pitaya is Tootie Fruity
Xilinx’s Zynq SoC is the best selling FPGA of all time. Zynq has brought together, at first an uncomfortable but necessary mix of software and hardware engineers. Two very different but special kind of people. Me, I’m of the hardware persuasion. Zynq is the start of the much needed open FPGA community. This will drive down the price… Read More
Semiconductor IP Validation Gets Faster
Semiconductor IP continues to grow in use for SoC design, and many chips can now use hundreds of IP blocks from multiple vendors. Validating the quality of the IP blocks is an important step in the design process, and you could perform manual validation and inspection of each new IP block at the expense of time and engineering effort.… Read More
A Brief History of Mobiveil
Semiconductor IP is a relatively established frontier for innovation in Silicon Valley but it is not as easy as it looks. It certainly is not as easy as the two year old start-up Mobiveil has made it look. With a team of more than 100, led by experienced Semiconductor IP professionals, Mobiveil already has a portfolio of silicon proven… Read More
FinFET Custom Design
At CDNLive, Bob Mullen of TSMC gave a presentation on their new custom FinFET flow, doing design, and verifying designs. At 16nm there are all sorts of relatively new verification problems such as layout dependent effects (LDE) and voltage dependent design rules. We had some of this at 20nm but like most things in semiconductor,… Read More
EDAC Mixer: Sonoma Chicken Coop
Get together with your fellow industry peers and insiders at the monthly EDAC Mixer, to the benefit of local charities. You don’t need to donate anything, you just show up and pay for your own drinks. A portion of the proceeds will go to local charities, this month to the Resource Area for Teaching (RAFT), a San Jose based non-profit… Read More
Sketch Router and auto-assist PCB layout
Archaic tech metaphors abound, stuck in the psyche of users everywhere. We still “dial” numbers, long after the benefit of a short pull area code disappeared. (Humans could dial 1, 2, or 3 a lot faster on a rotary phone, and there were fewer dialpulses for central office switches to decode – thus big cities with more phone traffic like… Read More
Sebastian Thrun: Self-driving cars, MOOCs, Google Glass and more
Sebastian Thrun gave a fascinating keynote at SNUG last week. It didn’t have that much to do with IC design but he discussed 3 projects that he had been involved with. Anyone would be happy to have just one of these projects on their resume but he has all these (and more).
The first is the Google self-driving car. This project actually… Read More
Intel High NA Adoption