The Linley Mobile Conference last week initiated a lot of discussion about emerging technologies and markets, especially wearables. Jessica Lipsky’s EE Times article captured some of the sentiments in her article, “Wearables Need Tailored SoCs.” But the conference covered a lot more ground than wearables, including mobile… Read More




Analog and Full Chip Simulation at Micron
IDM companies like Micronuse SPICE circuit simulators during the design phase in order to predict timing, currents and power on their custom IC chip designs at the transistor level. A senior memory design engineer at Micron named Raed Sabbahtalked today at a webinarabout how the embedded solutions group uses the FineSimcircuit… Read More
Get that Smartphone Chip out of my Wearable!
Last week, I had the pleasure to present at the Linley Group Mobile Conference. My presentation was part of the Wearable Device Session, which examined wearables from several different angles including software, sensor, processor, and IP.
As the smartphone market is maturing and the pace of innovation generally slowing, there… Read More
What Executives Say About IP Licensing
In the fabless world of semiconductor design, IP components have become indispensable partners and have enabled the development of complex billion gate SoCs. IP business in general is exhibiting a very high growth rate since couple of years and it is going to increase; the same is being reflected by a growing number of IP vendors… Read More
180nm still a big deal
When I was reading the recent Daniel Payne article “Designing Change Into Semiconductor Techonomics” with commentary on a recent presentation from Aart de Geus of Synopsys, one chart jumped out at me: the most popular process node for new design starts today is 180nm.
Upon mentioning that to a few of my IoT counterparts, they quickly… Read More
Intel is Still Missing Mobile!
Paul McLellan was on assignment in Hong Kong last week so I attended the Linley Mobile Conference and was not surprised Intel did not present. During the networking sessions I asked more than a dozen people why and the answers were pretty focused on “Intel still does not play well with others” and “Intel’s current mobile offerings… Read More
Processors For Internet of Things
Tomorrow and Thursday this week is the Internet of Things (IoT) developers conference. It takes place at the Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara. There are 3 keynotes and 3 CTO viewpoints:
- Driving Heterogeneous System Architectures Everywhere – Amit Rohatgi, Imagination Technologies
- Solving the Networking Puzzle: From IOT
New Method for Metrology with sub-10 nm Lithrography
NewPath Research will describe their new method for nanoscale carrier profiling in semiconductors on May 19[SUP]th[/SUP] at the Annual SEMI Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference (ASMC) in Saratoga Springs, NY. This new method is intended to fill the gap that has been addressed in the Roadmaps for the semiconductor… Read More
The Matrix, your ultimate OPC
One of the many consequences of shrinking process nodes is that traditional OPC can no longer achieve good pattern fidelity with reasonable turn-around-time. But there is a solution; we made it ourselves and call it matrix OPC.
First, let’s explore the problems with traditional optical proximity correction (OPC) when applied… Read More
IC Power Noise Reliability for FinFET Designs
Reliability for ICs is a big deal because the last thing that you want to do is ship a new part only to find out later in the field that there are failures not being caught by testing. I’ve already had two consumer products fail this year because of probable reliability issues: My MacBook Pro with 16GB of RAM started rebooting caused… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption