When you see a new product announcement from an EDA company, it is always put in terms that make it seem as if the engineer is sitting at his or her desktop with a big server and is running the new tool to wondrous effect. But the reality in the real world is that most companies have a computing infrastructure of server farms, often several… Read More




Signoff Summit and Voltus
Yesterday Cadence had an all-day Signoff Summit where they talked about the tools that they have for signoff in advanced nodes. Well, of course, those tools work just fine in non-advanced nodes too, but at 20nm and 16nm there are FinFETs, double patterning, timing impacts from dummy metal fill, a gazillion corners to be analyzed… Read More
Thermal Analysis for 3D SoC Integration
The first time that I saw a DRAM in a ceramic package running on a tester I made the mistake of touching my finger to the metal lid, scorching my finger and teaching me a lesson that ICs can run extremely hot. I’ve read a lot the past few years about 3D IC design, and immediately my mind becomes curious about how an engineer would go… Read More
It’s about the mobile GPU memory bandwidth per watt, folks
There has been a lot of huffing and puffing lately about 64-bit cores making it into the Apple A7 and other mobile SoCs, and we could probably dedicate a post to that discussion. However, there are a couple other wrinkles to the Apple A7 that should be getting a lot more attention.
There are two primary causes of user frustration in multimedia… Read More
QCOM delivers first TSMC 20nm mobile chips!
QCOM is now sampling the TSMC 20nm version of its market dominating Gobi LTE modem. The announcement also included a new turbo charged version of their 28nm Snapdragon 800 SoC with a Krait 450 quad core CPU and Adrino 420 GPU. Given the comparable benchmarks between the Intel 22nm SoC and the 28nm SoCs from Apple and QCOM, the new 20nm… Read More
Semiconductor market could grow 15% in 2014
The global semiconductor market has grown 4% for the first three quarters of 2013 compared to a year ago, according to World Semiconductor Trades Statistics (WSTS). Guidance for 4Q 2013 revenue change versus 3Q 2013 varies widely for key semiconductor companies. Texas Instruments (TI), Broadcom, Infineon and Renesas all expect… Read More
The Rosetta Stone of Lithography
At major EDA events, CEDA (the IEEE council on EDA, I guess you already know what that bit stands for) hosts a lunch and presentation for attendees and others. This week was ICCAD and the speaker was Lars Liebmann of IBM on The Escalating Design Impact of Resolution-Challenged Lithography. Lars decided to give us a whirlwind tour … Read More
Revisiting Andy Grove’s "Only the Paranoid Survive"
Over the course of the last fifty years there have been two significant books that have delivered emotional and operational clarity on the rise and fall of high tech companies and industries: The Innovator’s Dilemma and Only the Paranoid Survive. Amazingly, these two books were released within a year of each other (1996, 1997) … Read More
IoT begets silicon, interoperability, and standards
The Internet of Things is on every technology mind these days, but what does it mean for the EDA community? Dennis Brophy of Mentor Graphics says the billions of things we are hearing about will not happen unless we find a way to build a lot more things, efficient things, and connected things. He has more thoughts in our recent interview.… Read More
Interface Protocols, USB3, PCI Express, MIPI, DDRn… the winner and losers in 2013
How to best forecast a specific protocol adoption? One option is to look at the various IP sales, it will give you a good idea of the number of SoC or IC offering this feature on the market in the next 12 months. Once again, if you wait for the IP sale to have reached a maximum, it will be too late, so you have to monitor the IP sales dynamic when… Read More
Musk’s new job as Samsung Fab Manager – Can he disrupt chip making? Intel outside