At the DAC 50th anniversary banquet, Pat Pistilli won the award for most tenacious attendee, having been to all 50 DACs. Well, and for creating DAC and sustaining it. He was general chair for the first DAC (not yet called DAC) and, of course, would eventually form MP Associates with his wife Marie, which still runs DAC today. In 2010… Read More



Can we really find a way to speed-up Processor & DSP core designs?
Once upon a time, ASIC designers involved in Processor design, like I was, for the first time in 1987 for Thomson CSF and again in 1994 for Texas Instruments, at that time supporting height (8) ASIC designed by another French company, the Advanced Computer Research Institute (ACRI), had to re-invent the wheel almost every day. When… Read More
Agilent ADS Users, Find Out About Design Data Management
In May, ClioSoft and Agilent announced that Agilent’s Advanced Design System (ADS) was now integrated with ClioSoft’s SOS Design Data Management. I interviewed Greg Peterschmidt of Agilent at that time. The information page for the combined product, known as SOS viaADS is here.
Next week ClioSoft is presenting… Read More
DAC by the Numbers
The attendance numbers for DAC are out. Unless you have been living under a stone you know that DAC was in Austin Texas a couple of weeks ago. Attendance was:
- full conference passes: 1589
- exhibits-only passes: 2364
- booth staff: 1998
The registration is slightly lower than last year when DAC was in San Francisco (as it will be again … Read More
SEMICON West: My Top Picks
I will be at Semicon West from 9th to 11th July in Moscone, San Francisco. Of course there are lots of interesting sessions but here are two that I think are especially important to get a good impression of the way things are going in the future from experts. The two most interesting questions about the future are what comes after 14nm,… Read More
What does 3D IC, FinFETs, and EUV have in common?
They are three of the top trending terms on SemiWiki and three of the hot topics at this year’s Semicon West:
In its 43rd year, SEMICON West is the flagship annual event for the global microelectronics industry. It is the premier event for the display of new products and technologies for microelectronics design and manufacturing,… Read More
Static Low-Power Verification in Mixed-Signal SoC Designs
IC designer Shubhyant Chaturvediof AMD used EDA tools from Mentor Graphicsand Concept Engineeringto perform static, low-power verification of a mixed-signal SoC design with a combined CPU and GPU. Shubhyant presented a poster session at DAC two weeks ago in Austin, and I wanted to share it with my readers here at SemiWiki.… Read More
IC Variability Analysis at DAC
There were a handful of EDA vendors at DAC this year touting tools for IC variability analysis. On Tuesday I met with Firas Mohamed, CEO and President of Infiniscale.… Read More
A New STA Tool at DAC, No Not Cadence
The big EDA companies get big attention at DAC, however sometimes the little EDA start-ups like Arcadia Innovationhave a new product that can be overlooked. On Tuesday at DAC I met with Joey Lin, founder of Arcadia Innovation and learned about his new STA (Static Timing Analysis) tool called TimeHawk .… Read More
Physical IP Update at DAC
Last year at DAC I visited this little-known physical IP company called DXCorr, so I decided to visit them again this year and get an update.… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki