On Sunday in the USA we changed our clocks back one hour to account for Daylight Savings Time and I was reminded of how far we have to go in getting all of our devices to understand and automatically account for the time. Despite all of the talk about IoT and how it has the promise to automate our lives, we still have to manually set the time.… Read More
Captain America: Can Elon Musk Save America's Chip Manufacturing Industry?Intel has posted three consecutive years of falling…Read More
WEBINAR: Reclaiming Clock Margin at 3nm and BelowAt 3nm and below, clock networks have quietly…Read More
WEBINAR: HBM4E Advances Bandwidth Performance for AI TrainingThe rapid proliferation of LLMs and other AI…Read More
Siemens Wins Best in Show Award at Chiplet Summit and Targets Broad 3D IC Design EnablementThe recent Chiplet Summit in Santa Clara was…Read More
Siemens Fuse EDA AI Agent Releases to Orchestrate Agentic Semiconductor and PCB DesignThough terminology sometimes get fuzzy, consensus holds that…Read More
MQTT not IoT “god protocol”, but getting closer
One protocol, and its descendants, drove the success of the World Wide Web. IP, or Internet Protocol, is the basis of every browser connection and the backbone of IT data centers. Some assumed that the Internet of Things would follow suit,… Read More
Samsung 14nm is the one delayed!
As you may have read, the CEO of Ultratech made some unfortunate statements on the recent quarterly conference call in regards to FinFET Yield. As a result there has been a lot of speculation about the who, what, and why. I blogged about it because it interested me personally plus I wanted to collect more data on the subject. Some of … Read More
FD-SOI, an Opportunity for China?
Last month in Shanghai was a meeting of the FD-SOI consortium. The focus of the meeting was largely on the suitability of using FD-SOI to serve the Chinese market. The fabs in China are not right on the bleeding edge and are very cost-sensitive so 28nm is probably as advanced as they will get for a long time if not indefinitely. China … Read More
In-Design DFM Signoff for 14nm FinFET Designs
While FinFET yield controversy is going on, I see a lot being done to improve that yield by various means. One prime trend today, it must be, it’s worthwhile, is to pull up various signoffs as early as possible during the design cycle. And DFM signoff is a must with respect to yield of fabrication. This reminds me about my patents filed… Read More
Its a bouncing baby IEEE standard!
Pass the cigars! On November 3rd, 2014, the IEEE-SA Standards Board finally approved IEEE P1687 as a new standard. From now on, you can drop the “P” and just call it 1687, or to its friends, IJTAG. Now would be a good time to sign up for an IJTAG technical workshop.
The new IEEE 1687 Internal JTAG (IJTAG) standard is changing… Read More
Improve Test Robustness & Coverage Early in Design
In a semiconductor design, keeping the design testable with high test coverage has always been a requirement. However with shrinking technology nodes and large, dense SoC designs and complex logic structures, while it has become mandatory to reach close to 100% test coverage, it’s extremely difficult to cope with the explosion… Read More
Let the FinFET Yield Controversy Begin!
It never ceases to amaze me how people point fingers and create controversy to cover their mistakes. It happened at 40nm, 28nm, and again at 20nm and now it is time for the regularly scheduled yield controversy. Of course any conversation about semiconductor yield generates clicks for SemiWiki so I’m happy to play along.
It generally… Read More
DAC Deadlines: Action This Day
DAC is coming up. OK, it’s not actually until next June. It is June 7-11th 2015 at the Moscone Center here in San Francisco. But there are lots of important deadlines coming up for papers, panels and more. The 52[SUP]nd[/SUP] DAC will focus on five key tracks:
- automotive
- IP design
- embedded systems
- hardware/software security
Semiconductor IP Forecast 2014 – 2020
Given that the majority of my 30+ years in Silicon Valley has revolved around semiconductor IP it should be of no surprise that IP is a big part of SemiWiki and our first book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry”. That is also why one of my first round blogger draft choices was IP expert Dr. Eric Esteve. Eric has… Read More
Musk’s Orbital Compute Vision: TERAFAB and the End of the Terrestrial Data Center