From the sources in which I confirmed the last Intel 14nm delay, I just confirmed another. Intel 14nm is STILL having yield problems. Remember Intel bragging about 14nm being a full node and deriding TSMC because 16nm is “just” 20nm with FinFETs added? Judging by the graph, clearly FinFETs are not the problem here. … 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
Smart Strategies for Efficient Testing of 3D-ICs
3D-IC has a stack of dies connected and packaged together, and therefore needs new testing strategies other than testing a single die. It’s given that a single defective die can render the whole of 3D-IC unusable, so each die in the stack must be completely and perfectly tested before its entry into that stack. Looking at it from a … Read More
Designing an SoC with 16nm FinFET
IC designers contemplating the transition to 16nm FinFET technology for their next SoC need to be informed about design flow and IP changes, so TSMC teamed up with Cadence Design Systems today to present a webinar on that topic. I attended the webinar and will summarize my findings.
Shown below is a 3D layout concept of an ideal FinFET… Read More
Migrating to Andes from 8051
The 8051 microcontroller has been around for years…decades in fact. It was originally developed in 1980 by Intel. Back then it required 12 clock cycles per instruction but modern cores use just one. While it is still widely used, mostly as an IP core for SoCs, it is running out of steam despite running over 50 times faster than… Read More
A Brief History of Atmel
Atmel was founded in 1984. The name stands for “advanced technology for memory and logic” although initially the focus was on memory. George Perlegos the founder had worked in the memory group of Intel back when Intel was a memory company and not a microprocessor company although that didn’t stop Intel suing… Read More
ASTC and the new midrange ARM Mali-T720 GPU
When we last visited texture compression technology for OpenGL ES on mobile GPUs, we mentioned Squish image quality results in passing, but weren’t able to explore a key technology at the top of the results. With today’s introduction of the ARM Mali-T720 GPU IP, let’s look at the texture compression technology inside: Adaptive… Read More
ARM Announces A17
It is microprocessors all the time right now, with Linley last week. Today ARM announced the next generation Cortex-A17 core. It is a development built on the Cortex-A12 core, itself built on A7 (which is the current volume leader). ARM says that it is 60% faster than the A7 core, although I’m sure a lot of that gain is a process… Read More
If you still think that FDSOI is for low performance IC only…
…then you should read about this benchmark result showing how digital power varies with process corners, for high-speed data networking chip, not exactly the type of IC targeting mid-performance mobile application. Before discussing the benchmark results, we need to have some background about this kind of ASIC chip. Such a … Read More
Data Outgrowing Datacenter Performance
Last week I attended the Linley Datacenter Conference. This is not the conference on mobile which is not until April. However, a lot of the growth in datacenter is driven by mobile, with the increasing dominance of the model where data is accessed by smartphones but a lot of the backend computing and datastorage is in the cloud.
From… Read More
Update on AMS Verification at DVcon
Digital verification of SoCs is a well-understood topic and there’s a complete methodology to support it, along with many EDA vendor tools. On the AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) side of the design world life is not so easy, mostly because there are no clear standards to follow.
To gain some clarity into AMS verification I spoke… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography