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
Flexible Integration System for IPs into SoC
The number of IPs with growing complexity and heterogeneity is ever increasing (counting into hundreds) to be integrated into a single SoC. It’s not possible to have them all available at once and in a single repository for the integration engineers to assemble all of them together and integrate into the SoC. The reality is that … Read More
Do You Really Know RapidIO?
About 10 years ago, I was in charge of the product definition of our next IP to be released, the PCI Express gen-1 Controller. I was also involved in the decision process to select the new functions to develop, in respect with the market size, all of this being the definition of “marketing”. The reason why our company decided not to develop… Read More
TSMC Updates: 20nm, 16nm, and 10nm!
*Spoiler Alert: The Sky is Not Falling*
The TSMC Technology Symposium last month provided a much needed technology refresh to counter aging industry experts (they make their living selling reports) who have been somewhat negative on the future of the fabless semiconductor ecosystem. If the sky wasn’t falling who would… Read More
Weebit Nano Moves into the Mainstream with Customer Adoption