General purpose CPUs have run most EDA tools quite well for many years now, but if you really want to accelerate something like simulation then you start to look at using specializedhardware accelerators. . Emulators came onto the scene around 1986 and the processing power has greatly increased over the years, mostly in response… Read More



Photonic Computing – Now or Science Fiction?
Cadence recently held an event to dig into the emerging world of photonic computing. Called The Rise of Photonic Computing, it was a two-day event held in San Jose on February 7th and 8th. The first day of the event was also accessible virtually. I attended a panel discussion on the topic – more to come on that. The day delivered a rich… Read More
Intel Direct Connect Event
On Wednesday, February 21st Intel held their first Foundry Direct Connect event. The event had both public and NDA sessions, and I was in both. In this article I will summarize what I learned (that is not covered by NDA) about Intel’s business, process, and wafer fab plans (my focus is process technology and wafer fabs).
Business
… Read MorePodcast EP209: Putting Soitec’s Innovative Substrates to Work in Mainstream Products with Dr. Christophe Maleville
Dan is joined by Dr. Christophe Maleville, chief technology officer of Soitec’s Innovation. He joined Soitec in 1993 and was a driving force behind the company’s joint research activities with CEA-Leti. For several years, he led new SOI process development, oversaw SOI technology transfer from R&D to production and managed… Read More
A Candid Chat with Sean Redmond About ChipStart in the UK
When I first saw the Silicon Catalyst business plan 10 years ago I had very high hopes. Silicon Valley design starts were falling and Venture Capital Firms were distracted by software companies even though without silicon there would be no software.
Silicon Catalyst is an organization focused on accelerating silicon-based startups.… Read More
Arm Neoverse Continues to Claim Territory in Infrastructure
After owning general purpose compute in cell phones and IoT devices, it wasn’t clear what Arm’s next act might be. Seemingly the x86 giants dominated in datacenters and auguries suggested a bloody war in smaller platforms between Arm and RISC-V. But Arm knew what they were doing all along, growing upwards into infrastructure:… Read More
Pinning Down an EUV Resist’s Resolution vs. Throughput
The majority of EUV production is on 5nm and 3nm node, implemented by late 2022. Metal oxide resists have not been brought into volume production yet [1,2], meaning that only organic chemically amplified resists (CARs) have been used instead until now. These resists have a typical absorption coefficient of 5/um [3,4], which means
Cadence Debuts Celsius Studio for In-Design Thermal Optimization
Continuing the multiphysics theme, I talked recently with Melika Roshandell (Product Management Director at Cadence) on the continuing convergence between MCAD and ECAD. You should know first that Melika has a PhD in mechanical engineering and an extensive background in thermal engineering at Broadcom and Qualcomm, all very… Read More
Handling Preprocessed Files in a Hardware IDE
For several years now, I’ve been meeting with AMIQ EDA co-founder Cristian Amitroaie every few months to discuss the state of the industry, key trends in design and verification, and the ways that they help facilitate and accelerate chip development. I noticed an interesting new feature mentioned in their latest press release… Read More
Chiplet ecosystems enable multi-vendor designs
Chiplets dominate semiconductor industry conversations right now – and after the recent Chiplet Summit, we expect the intensity to go up a couple of notches. One company name often heard is Blue Cheetah, and we had the opportunity to sit down with them recently to discuss their views and their just-announced design win at Tenstorrent.… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki