A SemiWiki member mentioned CircuitLaba few months back so I took a look at it today and share my first impressions.… Read More
Schematic Capture and SPICE in the Cloud
Agentic AI and the EDA Revolution: Why Data Mobility, Security, and Availability Matter More Than EverThe EDA (Electronic Design Automation) and semiconductor industries…Read More
WEBINAR: What It Really Takes to Build a Future-Proof AI Architecture?Keeping up with competitors in many computing applications…Read More
Software-defined Systems at #62DACModern EVs are prime examples of software-defined systems,…Read More
Unlocking Efficiency and Performance with Simultaneous Multi-ThreadingAn Akeana hosted webinar on Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT)…Read More
Power and Reliability Sign-off – A must, but how?
At the onset of SoCs with multiple functionalities being packed together at the helm of technologies to improve upon performance and area; power, which was earlier neglected, has become critical and needs special attention in designing SoCs. And there comes reliability considerations as well due to multiple electrical and … Read More
Premier Gathering for Semiconductor Professionals!
The US Executive Forum hosted by the Global Semiconductor Alliance is coming up on September 25th at the beautiful Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel in Menlo Park. Over 150 executives from the semiconductor and technology industry will attend creating a truly unique opportunity to listen to some of the world’s foremost speakers… Read More
Lynn Conway’s Story
If you are my age, you know that the most influential book in that era on VLSI design was Carver Mead and Lynn Conway’s textbook, blah VLSI blah. Nobody can remember exactly what its title was, it was just referred to as Mead and Conway. In my opinion it was the most influential book on semiconductor design ever. It opened up VLSI… Read More
What Applications Implement Best with High Level Synthesis?
RTL coding using languages like Verilog and VHDL have been around since the 1980’s and for almost as long a time we’ve been hearing about High Level Synthesis, or HLS that allows an SoC designer to code above the RTL level where you code at the algorithm level. The most popular HLS languages today are C, C++ and SystemC.… Read More
Epitaxy: Not Just For PMOS Anymore
At Semicon I met with Applied Materials to learn about epitaxy. This is when a monocrystalline film is grown on the substrate which takes on a lattice structure that matches the substrate. It forms a high purity starting point for building a transistor and is also the basis of the strain engineering in a modern process.
Since holes… Read More
System Reliability Audits
How reliable is your cell-phone? Actually, you don’t really care. It will crash from time to time due to software bugs and you’ll throw it away after two or three years. If a few phones also crash due to stray neutrons from outer space or stray alpha particles from the solder balls used in the flip-chip bonding then nobody… Read More
From Layout Sign-off to RTL Sign-off
This week, I had a nice opportunity meeting Charu Puri, Corporate Marketing and Sushil Gupta, V.P. & Managing Director at Atrenta, Noida. Well, I know Sushil since 1990s; in fact, he was my manager at one point of time during my job earlier than Cadence. He leads this large R&D development centre, consisting about 200 people… Read More
Any MIPI CSI-3 Host IP Solution for SoCs Interfacing with Sensors?
For those taking a quick look at the various MIPI Interface specification, the first reaction is to realize that they will have to look at MIPI more closely, and that it will take them longer than expected to make sure they really understand the various specifications! Let’s start with the PHY. One specification defines the D-PHY,… Read More
Semicon: Multiple Patterning vs EUV, round #2
Round #1 was here.
In the EUV corner were Stefan Wurm of Sematech (working on mask issues mostly) and Skip Miller of ASML who are the only company making EUV steppers (and light sources, they acquired Cymer).
You may know that the biggest issue in EUV is getting the source brightness to have high enough energy that an EUV stepper has … Read More
Should Intel be Split in Half?