Operational amplifiers, which are among the most widely used analog components found in nearly all types of electronic systems, are migrating toward zero-drift capability and much-greater range of voltages at the supplies and the inputs. Take Linear Technology Corp.’s LTC2057HV, a zero-drift operational amplifier, which… Read More
CEO Interview with Faraj Aalaei of CognichipFaraj Aalaei is a successful visionary entrepreneur with…Read More
Rethink Scoreboards to Supercharge AI-Era CPUsBy Dr. Thang Minh Tran, CEO/CTO Simplex Micro…Read More
Jitter: The Overlooked PDN Quality MetricBruce Caryl is a Product Specialist with Siemens EDA…Read More
CEO Interview with Vamshi Kothur, of Tuple TechnologiesIt was my pleasure to meet with Vamshi…Read More
Webinar – Power is the New Performance: Scaling Power & Performance for Next Generation SoCsWhat if you could reduce power and extend…Read More
Riding the Wave of Silicon Magic in 2015!
2014 was a busy year for SemiWiki. We attended dozens of events, met hundreds of people (if not thousands), and published 810 blogs and a book that reached more than half of a million people. We collaborated throughout the fabless semiconductor ecosystem all year long and let me tell you it has been an amazing mind expanding experience,… Read More
Methodology Help for Analog IC Designers
Digital designers are more numerous than analog IC designers, and so they tend to get more attention from EDA vendors in terms of tools and automation methodologies. For an analog design team with specialists focused separately on schematics and layout there are several methodology questions that need to be addressed, like:… Read More
Variation: How Can We Survive?
At IEDM last week Coventor hosted a panel session as they do each year. The theme this year was surviving variation. The panel was hosted by someone whose name is familiar round here, Dan Nenni. The panel that Coventor had put together had people from all sorts of different slots in the design/supply chain for semiconductor. Unfortunately… Read More
Is Fab Business The Forte of APAC?
A little ago, I was looking at the top20 semiconductor companies in the world and was surprised to see a couple of large companies in Taiwan and South Korea garnering >34% of total sales (See – Look who is Leading the World Semiconductor Business). This time it’s another surprise, when I look at IC Insights report on global 300mm… Read More
Kathryn Kranen at IEDM
It is the 50th year of IEDM, the International Electron Devices Meeting. The fact that it has been going for so long reveals why it has such an odd name: back in 1964 most “electron devices” were tubes (valves in UK lingo). This year they gave all of us a USB stick with all the papers from all 50 years of the event, something… Read More
Components for Wearables, Making the IoT Real
The screenwriter William Goldman is famous for saying that in Hollywood “Nobody knows anything.” Meaning that there is simply no way for any of the people involved to be able to predict which movies will turn out to be hits and which will be flops. I think the internet of things (IoT) is going to be like that. There will … Read More
Last VIP News of 2014
It’s likely that most of the current Semiwiki readers didn’t read this article posted in 2011, comparing Cadence and Synopsys with the Soviet Union and the USA, sharing the world in 1944 during the Yalta Conference. I was explaining in my post that Synopsys’s strong influence was on Design IP when Cadence’s preferred domain was … Read More
Results of TSMC’s ECO Fill Flow
By Jeff Wilson, Mentor Graphics and Anderson Chiu, TSMC
At this year’s TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor Graphics and TSMC co-presented some results of the ECO Fill flow developed for TSMC customers working at advanced nodes. Here is a summary of the presentation. (TSMC customers can access the presentation… Read More
Ensuring Safety Distinctive Design & Verification
In today’s world where every device functions intelligently, it automatically becomes active on any kind of stimulus. The problem with such intelligence is that it can function unfavorably on any kind of bad stimulus. As the devices are complex enough in the form of SoCs (which at advanced process nodes are more susceptible to … Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography