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Mobile SoCs: Two Cores are Better Than Four?

Mobile SoCs: Two Cores are Better Than Four?
by Paul McLellan on 01-20-2013 at 8:00 am

I came across an interesting white-paper from ST Ericsson on two topics: multi-processors in mobile platforms and FD-SOI. FD-SOI is the ST Microelectronics alternative to FinFETs for 20nm and below. It stands for Fully-Depeleted Silicon-on-Insulator. But I’m going to save that part of the white-paper for another blog… Read More


What did CES 2013 mean for #SemiEDA?

What did CES 2013 mean for #SemiEDA?
by Don Dingee on 01-18-2013 at 4:55 pm

CES is the preeminent gadget show, and in the LVCC South Hall a wave has been building for some time. It’s now the place where chipsets are introduced, and this year saw a wide range of introductions from Atmel, Bosch, Broadcom, Intel (OK, they’re still in Central Hall), InvenSense, Marvell, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Samsung, ST-Ericsson,… Read More


Yawn… New EDA Leader Results Are Coming

Yawn… New EDA Leader Results Are Coming
by Randy Smith on 01-18-2013 at 4:00 pm

We will soon start to see the quarterly financial reporting installments of the “Big 3” public EDA companies. I predict they will be as boring as usual. I am not sure if I would want it any differently though.

Back in the 90s there were times when it was truly interesting to wait to see what Cadence, Mentor, or later Synopsys, might announce.… Read More


Oasys Has a New CEO

Oasys Has a New CEO
by Paul McLellan on 01-18-2013 at 2:21 pm

Scott Seaton is the new CEO of Oasys Design Systems. Paul van Besouw, the CEO since the company’s founding, becomes the CTO. I met Scott last year when I was doing some consulting work for Carbon Design where he was VP of sales (the new VP sales at Carbon is Hal Conklin, by the way).

I talked to Scott about why he had joined Oasys. … Read More


Buying DDRn Controller IP AND Memory Model to the same IP vendor gives real TTM advantage

Buying DDRn Controller IP AND Memory Model to the same IP vendor gives real TTM advantage
by Eric Esteve on 01-17-2013 at 10:52 am

We all know the concept of “one stop shop”, becoming popular in the Design IP market. The topic we will address today is NOT the “one stop shop”, even if it looks similar, but rather that we could call “consistent design flow”.

What does that means? Simply that, if your SoC design is integrating a DDRn (LPDDR2, DDR3 or even DDR4, let’s… Read More


Fixing Double-patterning Errors at 20nm

Fixing Double-patterning Errors at 20nm
by Paul McLellan on 01-16-2013 at 10:54 pm

David Avercrombie of Mentor won the award for the best tutorial at the 2012 TSMC OIP for his presentation, along with Peter Hsu of TSMC, on Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in 20nm. The whole presentation along with the slides is now available online here. The first part of the presentation is an introduction to double … Read More


Mentor @ the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Forum

Mentor @ the TSMC Open Innovation Platform Forum
by glforte on 01-16-2013 at 6:16 pm

At TSMC’s Open Innovation Platform (OIP) Ecosystem Forum, Mentor made technical presentations on four different topics, two of them co-presented with TSMC and LSI Corporation. Those presentations are described below with links to downloadable pdf presentation files.

Finding and Fixing Double Patterning Errors in
Read More


A Brief History of Apache Design

A Brief History of Apache Design
by Daniel Nenni on 01-16-2013 at 3:00 pm

Apache Design Solutions was founded in 2001 by Andrew Yang and three researchers from HP Labs (Norman Chang, Shen Lin, Weize Xie). They realized that engineers striving to meet the goal of increased device miniaturization, as defined by Moore’s Law, would eventually hit stumbling blocks in their progress. The founding team believed… Read More


All Things Resistive

All Things Resistive
by Christie Marrian on 01-16-2013 at 5:03 am

A quick re-introduction of ReRAM-Forum.com which is dedicated to all things related to resistive RAM, broadly characterized as ReRAM (or RRAM) and CBRAM. The technology is seen as the ‘next generation’ non-volatile memory solution and is being developed by companies large and small for a variety of applications in storage, … Read More


Scandals Rock and Shock CES 2013!

Scandals Rock and Shock CES 2013!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-15-2013 at 7:00 pm

Like any other event, the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is not immune to unethical and inappropriate behavior. Unfortunately one of digital media’s finest got caught this year doing what most publications have done since the beginning of time. CNET bowed to pressure from above and changed the outcome of the annual… Read More