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450mm Delayed and Other SPIE News

450mm Delayed and Other SPIE News
by Scotten Jones on 03-04-2014 at 11:00 pm

Last week I attended the SPIE Advanced Technology Conference. There were a lot of interesting papers and as is always the case at these conferences, there was a lot of interesting things to learn from talking to other attendees on the conference floor.

The first interesting information from the conference floor was that 450mm is… Read More


What I Didn’t Know about Electronic Design Automation

What I Didn’t Know about Electronic Design Automation
by Daniel Payne on 03-04-2014 at 7:36 pm

I started using internal EDA tools at Intel beginning in 1978 and have worked in the commercial EDA industry since 1986, so it was a delight to read a chapter about EDA in Nenni and McLellan’s newest book: Fabless – The Transformation of the Semiconductor Industry. Starting in the 1970’s the authors talk about… Read More


Dr. Walden Rhines Vision on Semiconductor & India

Dr. Walden Rhines Vision on Semiconductor & India
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-04-2014 at 11:00 am

Last month India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA) held its Vision Summit at Bangalore in which luminaries from across the semiconductor and electronics industry presented their views about the future of this industry and India’s progress. Dr. Walden C. Rhines, Chairman and CEO of Mentor Graphicspresented… Read More


Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler

Synopsys Announces Verification Compiler
by Paul McLellan on 03-04-2014 at 8:00 am

Integration is often an underrated attribute of good tools, compared to raw performance and technology. But these days integration is differentiation (try telling that to your calculus teacher). Today at DVCon Synopsys announced Verification Compiler which integrates pretty much all of Synopsys’s verification technologies… Read More


Does Multiprotocol-PHY IP really boost TTM?

Does Multiprotocol-PHY IP really boost TTM?
by Eric Esteve on 03-04-2014 at 4:33 am

I have often written in Semiwiki about high speed PHY IP supporting Interface protocols (see for example this blog), the SoC cornerstone, almost as crucial as CPU, GPU or SDRAM Memory Controller. When you architect a SoC, you first select CPU(s) and/or GPU(s) to support the system basic functionality (Processor for Mobile application,… Read More


ARM Lab in a Box

ARM Lab in a Box
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2014 at 5:57 pm

St. Francis Xavier said “Give me the child until he is seven and I’ll give you the man.” ARM is not going for them quite that young but this week they announced their “lab in a box” for participating universities worldwide. It is actually a joint launch between the ARM University Program (which is not new)… Read More


Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers

Baskin-Robbins Only has 31 Flavors. Atmel has 505 Microcontrollers
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2014 at 4:59 pm

Actually these days even Baskin-Robbins has more, but not 505. But as it says in the title, Atmel have 505 different microcontrollers. That’s a lot. Some are AVR, both 8 bit and 32 bit, and some are various flavors of ARM (all 32 bit) ranging from older parts like the ARM9 to various flavors of Cortex ranging from the M0 (tiny microcontroller… Read More


Xilinx vs. Altera DSP

Xilinx vs. Altera DSP
by Luke Miller on 03-02-2014 at 1:00 pm

Did you know in the Xilinx Virtex 28nm series you can REALLY run the DSP at 741 MHz? I say ‘really’ as you know dear reader, not all the FPGA claims of speed and usage tends to live up to reality. I cannot stand marketing games where you can run at a GHz ‘But’ and then comes the list of gotcha’s. Don’t believe me? Whaaat? Well let’s take a journey… Read More


Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, Keynote!

Sir Hossein Yassaie, CEO of Imagination Technologies, Keynote!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-02-2014 at 12:00 pm

Semiconductor IP is a focus of this year’s Design Automation conference and I’m excited to see a keynote by one of the leaders of this market segment. Even more interesting, Dr. Hossein Yassaie was knighted by the Queen in Her Majesty’s New Year Honours 2013. The award was given in recognition of his services to technology… Read More


Effect of Inductance on Interconnect

Effect of Inductance on Interconnect
by Daniel Nenni on 03-02-2014 at 11:00 am

In previous design generations interconnect could safely be modeled by extraction using just R and C values. Parasitics in interconnect are important because they can affect the operating frequency or phase error in circuits like VCO’s. The need to model parasitics properly in wires is just as applicable in PA’s, LNA’s and for… Read More