Ever sat around waiting for a time slot on the one piece of big, powerful, expensive engineering equipment everyone in the building wants to use? It’s frustrating for engineers, and a project manager’s nightmare: a tool that can deliver big results, and a lot of schedule juggling.… Read More





Social Media at Silvaco
Founded back in 1984, Silvaco has been in business for some 29 years now, focusing on the TCAD and EDA markets.
Browsing their Home page at www.silvaco.com we find four social media links in the footer: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.… Read More
SLEC is Not LEC
One of the questions that Calypto is asked all the time is what is the difference between sequential logical equivalence checking (SLEC) and logical equivalence checking (LEC).
LEC is the type of equivalence checking that has been around for 20 years, although like all EDA technologies gradually getting more powerful. LEC is … Read More
Semicon Technology Advancement – A View From IEDM
As I see the semiconductor industry going through significant changes and advances, yet ironically plagued by a growing perception that the pace of scaling is slowing, I was inclined to take a peek into what the industry experts say about the state of the industry and the future of Moore’s Law. Fortunately, at last week’s International… Read More
EDA and Semi IP Stocks in 2013: MENT, ARMH, CDN, SNPS, ANSS, CEVA, IMG.L
2013 was an up year for the stock markets as both the DJIA and the tech-heavy NASDAQ showed significant growth, so how did EDA and Semi IP companies do in the past 12 months? A quick stock plot from Yahoo Finance shows us that only two of the seven companies beat the NASDAQ: ARMH, MENT.… Read More
Semiconductor equipment back on track
Global semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales have increased each of the last three quarters after dropping significantly in the second half of 2012, based on data from Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) and Semiconductor Equipment Association of Japan (SEAJ). Much of the volatility is in sales… Read More
The hottest real estate? Your wrist!
I first read about the Pebble smartwatch earlier this year and thought “I don’t need yet another electronic device, and certainly not one that’s attached to my body.” Then I felt bad. Am I a troglodyte? It’s true, I do still have an iPhone 4, which is a little embarrassing in Silicon Valley. I have also never worn a wrist watch of any kind,… Read More
The Most Popular Blog Posts at Cadence in 2013
I spend about an hour a day reading blogs from EDA companies, foundries, independent bloggers and of course, SemiWiki. Richard Goering at Cadence assembled a top 10 list of the most popular blogs posted on their site in 2013, revealing that engineers were most interested in: FinFETs, 20nm and smaller nodes, memory technology and… Read More
TSMC: 3D, 450mm, CoWoS and More
The first keynote at the Burlingame 3D conference was by Doug Yu of TSMC. Not surprisingly he was talking about 3D. In particular, TSMC has WLSI technology that they call CoWoS, which stands for chip-on-wafer-on-substrate which pretty much describes how it is built. This is the technology that Xilinx uses for its recently announced… Read More
Complete IP port-folio built in less than two years!
We have posted several blogs related to Cadence IP strategy, or I should say new strategy. Each of these blogs was dealing with a particular product, like PCI Express gen-3 Controller IP, latest DDR4 Memory Controller or Wide I/O. This approach was equivalent to describe trees, one after one, and finally ignoring the forest! It’s… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside