Usually, we get the incremental story in news: this new release is x percent better at this or that than the previous release, and so on. Often missing is the big picture, telling how the pieces all tie together. Synopsys took on that challenge in their latest FPGA-based prototyping webinar. … Read More




ARM’s Quarterly Results: Licensing Strong, Royalties Weak, Future is Bright
Last week was ARM’s quarterly earnings call. Simon Segars, the CEO, and Tim Score, the CFO, presented from London.
First, the numbers:
- revenue was up 17% year-on-year in dollar terms to $309.6M, but only 9% in Sterling terms due to exchange rate moves to £187.1
- profit before tax was $94.2M
- licensing was up 42% year-on-year
Accelerating SoC Verification Through HLS
Once upon a time there was a struggle for verification completion of semiconductor designs at gate level. Today, beyond imagination, there is a struggle to verify a design with billions of gates at the RTL level which may never complete. The designs are large SoCs with complex architectures and several constraints of area, performance,… Read More
FD-SOI: 20nm Performance at 28nm Cost
There has been a lot of controversy about whether FD-SOI is or is not cheaper to manufacture than FinFET. Since right now FinFET is a 16nm process (22nm for Intel) and FD-SOI is, for now, a 28nm process it is not entirely clear how useful a comparison this is. Scotten Jones has very detailed process cost modeling software (that is what… Read More
A Win-Win Royalty Deal Structure in IP Business
Royalty is a critical component in any IP deal. SoC companies want IP companies to share the risk of success (or failure) of their SoC and to enable that they want IP vendors to accept a substantial part of their payment to be paid as royalty. But the customers are also not very interested to shell out huge money to IP companies if the SoC… Read More
Altera vs Xilinx FinFET Update
One of the things I do in my spare time is listen to quarterly conference calls and try to sort fact from fiction. I compare past calls to the current one and attempt to predict what’s coming next. Confucius said, “Study the past if you would define the future” and I’m a big believer in that.
Paul McLellan wrote about the Xilinx call earlier… Read More
Getting a Tapeout Quote in 10 Minutes!
On Thursday, July 31[SUP]st[/SUP] at 8 AM Pacific Daylight Time I’ll be moderating a webinar that will demo eSilicon’s new GDSII quoting portal. You can find more details about the webinar here, and you can register here.
I’ve worked with a lot of companies that do advanced custom IC designs. Getting a quote that covers all the NRE… Read More
Taking a leap forward from TCAD
We all know that Technology Computer Aided Design (TCAD) simulations are essential in developing processes for semiconductor manufacturing. From the very nature of these simulations (involving physical structure and corresponding electrical characteristics of a transistor or device), they are predominantly finite-element… Read More
Temperature – The Fourth Aspect to Look at in SoC Design
In my career in semiconductor industry, I can recall, in the beginning there was emphasis on design completion with automation as fast as possible. The primary considerations were area and speed of completion of a semiconductor design. Today, with unprecedented increase in multiple functions on the same chip and density of the… Read More
Hybrid Emulation
Hybrid emulation is when part of the system is run in the emulator and part of the system is run in a virtual prototype. Typically a model of the processor(s) is run in the virtual platform and then the rest of the design is modeled by running the RTL on the emulator. I talked to Tom Borgstrom at Synopsys about what technology they have … Read More
Intel’s Pearl Harbor Moment