SemiWiki webinar 800x100 Feb 2025 V2 (1)

Calypto 2013 Report

Calypto 2013 Report
by Paul McLellan on 07-05-2013 at 5:48 am

Each year Calypto runs a survey of end-users. This year’s survey and report has two parts, power reduction and high level synthesis (HLS).

The topics covered are:

  • survey methodology and demographics
  • top methods used to reduce power
  • engineering time spent on specfiic RTL tasks to reduce power
  • plans to deploy RTL power reduction
Read More

GSA Awards Deadline Looming + GSA Entrepreneurship Conference

GSA Awards Deadline Looming + GSA Entrepreneurship Conference
by Paul McLellan on 07-05-2013 at 5:09 am

GSA has award for various categories that are presented at their annual awards dinner. This year’s dinner will be on Thursday December 12th at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

Some of the awards have now passed their cutoff date. But a few remain open until July 12th (hurry, just one more week):

  • Startup to Watch Award
  • Most
Read More

Should the Design Automation Conference Colocate with SEMICON West?

Should the Design Automation Conference Colocate with SEMICON West?
by Daniel Nenni on 07-03-2013 at 8:10 pm

My friend and fellow blogger Kurt Shuler wrote recently, “DAC Is Dead? Long Live DAC!”, which is worth a click over. In addition to providing a nice attendance graph and the top three reasons why it is NOT all rosy, Kurt suggests colocating DAC with other conferences (DESIGN West) but fails to mention SEMICON West.

SEMICON West is Read More


Easy SystemC Debugging

Easy SystemC Debugging
by Randy Smith on 07-03-2013 at 7:00 pm

Electronic system design has been slowly migrating to higher level languages such as SystemC for more than a decade now. SystemC is an open source C++ library that has emerged as a standard for high-level design and system modeling. Writing code in SystemC has several advantages which I won’t elaborate on in this article, though… Read More


Free Pass to SEMICON West!

Free Pass to SEMICON West!
by Beth Martin on 07-03-2013 at 1:00 pm

SEMICON West is next week, July 9-11 in San Francisco. If you haven’t signed up, and want to attend for free instead of $100,

1) Send an email to silicon_test@mentor.com with subject line “Semicon pass.”
2) Register for SEMICON West
3) After registering, download the SEMICON West mobile app and start building your schedule. Here… Read More


LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley

LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley
by Paul McLellan on 07-03-2013 at 3:03 am

If DAC is the most general event in our industry, then the LicenseMonitor Users’ Group Silicon Valley has to be one of the most focused. It was held back in May but one of the key presentations was Brian Janes of RTDA talking about what is new in the latest version of LicenseMonitor which is 2013.03.

Like a number of people at RTDA,… Read More


Full Chip IR Drop Analysis using Distributed Multi Processing

Full Chip IR Drop Analysis using Distributed Multi Processing
by Daniel Payne on 07-02-2013 at 6:56 pm

IR drop analysis across your board, package and SoC ensures that your Power Delivery Network (PDN) is robust, and that your system will function to spec. There are both static and dynamic approaches to IR drop analysis of a full-chip with billions of transistors, while the dynamic approach produces the most accurate results compared… Read More


Globalization of Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry

Globalization of Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry
by Daniel Nenni on 07-02-2013 at 3:00 am

The following is a brief summery of an article co authored by SemiWiki member Apek Mulay.It is definitely worth a read when you get a chance:

Globalization of Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry: From Deception to Reformation Towards Recovering US Macro-Micro Economic Losses


During the recent recession (since 2007), many… Read More


A Brief History of VLSI Technology, part 1

A Brief History of VLSI Technology, part 1
by Paul McLellan on 07-01-2013 at 8:15 pm

VLSI Technology was founded in 1981 by Dan Floyd, Jack Baletto and Gunnar Wetlesen who had worked together at Signetics. The initial investments were by Hambrecht and Quist, a cross between a VC and a bank, and by Evans and Sutherland, the simulation/graphics company.

The fourth person to join the company was Doug Fairbairn. He … Read More


Smartphone Shipment Explosion Sustained by $50-$75 devices, Mostly in China

Smartphone Shipment Explosion Sustained by $50-$75 devices, Mostly in China
by Eric Esteve on 07-01-2013 at 9:21 am

Until recently, talking about smartphone incredible shipment growth was understood as shipments of A5 iPhone or Galaxy Note, and this was true. Devices priced at $500 or more are shipping like baguette in Paris, but this fact is only true in Europe, Korea, Japan or USA. Does that means that people living populated countries like… Read More