The DSP48E2 (I do not come up with these names… Could have named it a multiplier thingy) in the Xilinx 20nm UltraScale family (I do not come up with these names… Could of named it Virtex-8, or Luke-8) is simply amazing. Today was good, as I began playing with UltraScale tools and seeing how the DSP checks out. I also encourage you to check… Read More





ISSCC 2014 SerDes Presentation
For those of you who missed the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference last month some of the presentations are now hitting the company websites. The theme of this year’s conference was SILICON SYSTEMS BRIDGING THE CLOUD:… Read More
Atmel on Tour at AT&T Park
OK, it’s not exactly AT&T park…it’s the parking lot. But they have a huge semi loaded up with lots of cool Atmel stuff to show off some of the things that their customers are doing with their microcontrollers and display technology, primarily focused on the internet of things (IoT). I went down to check it … Read More
Social Media at Carbon Design Systems
Started in 2002 Carbon Design Systems has ESL (Electronic System Level) modeling and validation tools for complex SoC design. With their software you can:
- Perform system level model generation of existing and 3rd party IP directly from RTL for use in any virtual platform
- Do performance analysis & optimization of SoC architectures
Mentor U2U Is On April 10th
If you are a Mentor user, U2U, the Mentor User group is coming up on April 10th. This is an all day event at the DoubleTree. The event is free. Registration starts at 8am and the agenda itself starts at 9am. There is a reception from 5-6pm in the evening.
There are three keynotes. At 9am: Wally Rhines, CEO of Mentor. The Big Squeeze. For … Read More
A Fill Solution for 20nm at TSMC
By Jeff Wilson, Mentor Graphics
We’ve talked about the new requirements for Fill in IC design for advanced nodes in previous blogs on this site. This time I’d like describe the fill solution that Mentor and TSMC have jointly developed to meet the requirements of fill for TSMC’s 20nm (N20) manufacturing process.
The traditional… Read More
GSA Silicon Summit Is On April 10th
The annual GSA Silicon Summit is coming up in a few weeks. It is on April 10th at the Computer History Museum. Registration is at 9am and the meeting itself gets started at 9.45am. The summit finishes at 2.15pm. There are three sections during the day, and lunch is provided.
The first section is on Advancements in Nanoscale Manufacturing… Read More
The Technology to Continue Moore’s Law…
Can we agree about the fact that the Moore’s law is discontinuing after 28nm technology node? This does not mean that the development of new Silicon technology, like 14nm or beyond, or/and new Transistor architecture like FinFET will not happen. There will be a market demand for chips developed on such advanced technologies: mobile… Read More
Xilinx & Apache Team up for FPGA Reliability at 20nm
In this age of SoCs with hundreds of IPs from different sources integrated together and working at high operating frequencies, FPGA designers are hard pressed keeping up the chip reliability from issues arising out of excessive static & dynamic IR drop, power & ground noise, electro migration and so on. While the IPs are… Read More
Cadence is all about Semiconductor IP!
Cadence continues on its quest to be a top semiconductor IP supplier which is a good thing since the semiconductor world now revolves around IP. Cadence CEO Lip-Bu Tan mentioned IP 14 times during his keynote and he was followed by the president of Imagination Technologies and the CEO of recently acquired Tensilica. I was not afforded… Read More
Rapidus, IBM, and the Billion-Dollar Silicon Sovereignty Bet