Synopsys is taking IP-SOC 2013 seriously, as the company will hold several presentations, starting with a Keynote: “Virtual Prototyping – A Reality Check”, by Johannes Stahl, Director, Product Marketing, System-Level Solutions, Synopsys, highlighting current industry practice around putting virtual prototyping to work… Read More





ARM in Samsung 14nm FinFET
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
What you compress may not be all you get
Now that we’ve looked at the basics, we wrap up this three-part series exploring PVRTC texture compression. We’ll take a brief look at PVRTC2, the latest version of the technology, and then explore the issues behind visual quality from several different angles.
PVRTC2 is supported on the newest Series5XT or Series6 GPU cores from… Read More
The Alternative to FinFET: FD-SOI
Everywhere you turn these days you find FinFETs. Intel has had them since 22nm (they use the word Tri-gate but it is the same as what the world calls FinFET) and TSMC will have them at 16nm. So why FinFET? And is there an alternative?
The reason that regular bulk planar transistors have run out of steam is that the channel area underneath… Read More
ARC EM SEP Processor, Safety Ready Solution for Automotive
If you are familiar with Processor IP core, you certainly know DesignWare ARC EM4 core, 32-bit CPU that SoC designers can optimize for a wide range of uses, and differentiate by using patented configuration technology to tailor each ARC core instance to meet specific performance, power and area requirements. If you develop a product… Read More
Social Media at Mentor Graphics
You can often tell how important blogging and social media is to an EDA company by how much effort it takes to find their blog from the Home page. For the folks at Mentor Graphics I’d say that blogging is quite important, because it shows up as a top-level menu item. Notice also how important Twitter is, their latest tweets show… Read More
Correct by Construction Semiconductor IP
Semiconductor IP re-use enables modern SoC designs to be realized in a timely fashion, yet with hundreds of IP blocks in a chip the chances are higher that an error in any IP block could cause the entire system to fail. At advanced nodes like 28nm and smaller, the number of Process, Voltage and Temperature (PVT) corners is increasing… Read More
MEMS in The World of ICs – How to Quickly Verify?
In the modern electronic world, it’s difficult to imagine any system working as a whole without MEMS (Micro-electromechanical Systems) such as pressure sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, microphones etc. working in sync with other ICs. Specifically in AMS (Analog Mixed-Signal) semiconductor designs, there can be significant… Read More
TSMC ♥ Mentor (Calibre PERC)
As semiconductors become more integrated into our lives reliability is becoming a critical issue. As IP consumes more of our die, IP reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we pack more transistors into a chip, reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we move from 28nm to 20nm to 16nm, reliability is becoming a critical … Read More
Pigs Fly. Altera Goes with ARM on Intel 14nm
Altera announced in February that they would be using Intel as a foundry at 14nm. Historically they have used TSMC. Then in June they announced the Stratix 10 family of FPGAs that they would build on the Intel process. At the Globalpress summit in May I asked Vince Hu about their processor strategy. Here is what I wrote about itat the… Read More
Facing the Quantum Nature of EUV Lithography