At the recent NCCAVS Thin Film Users Group meeting in November, HP was on the program in the person of Joshua Yang who gave a materials centric look at the status of the HP ReRAM (Memristor) program. A colleague passed on the informative set of slides presented at the meeting. Being a former process integration team leader, I was immediately… Read More




A Comparison of SemiWiki and DeepChip
An email update from John Cooley at DeepChip this morning prompted the bloggers here at SemiWiki to continue the discussion and point out incorrect data, so that readers realize what is really happening with our media portals as sources of timely and relevant news and opinion. I respect what John Cooley has done with DeepChip over… Read More
Schematic Capture and SPICE from Symica
At DAC in June I first blogged about Symicabecause they offered a Fast SPICE circuit simulator, and today I discovered a free version so I decided to write up a mini-review for you.… Read More
A Brief History of Synopsys
One of the largest software companies in the world, Synopsys is a market and technology leader in the development and sale of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and semiconductor intellectual property (IP). Synopsys is also a strong supporter of local education through the Synopsys Outreach Foundation. Each year in multiple… Read More
When ARM and CEVA team-up for “Designing a Multi-core LTE-A Modem”
ARM and CEVA have launched a white paper, addressing one of the hottest topics of the day: LTE-Advanced modem architecture. This very exhaustive paper, written by David Maidment (Mobile Segment Manager, ARM), Chris Turner (Senior Product Manager, ARM) and Eyal Bergman (VP Product Marketing, Baseband & Connectivity, CEVA… Read More
Happy Holidays
At times of this year, companies usually get their salespeople to submit the names and addresses of all their customers. They then get an expensive card printed and mail it out. What the recipient does is anyone’s guess, from throwing it straight in the bin to using it to decorate the office.
Atrenta decided to do something … Read More
Zynq out of the box, in FPGA-based prototyping
Roaming around the hall at ARM TechCon 2012 left me with eight things of note, but one of the larger ideas showing up everywhere is the Xilinx Zynq. Designers are enthralled with the idea of a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 closely coupled with programmable logic.… Read More
3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging
There is obviously a lot going on in 3D IC these days. And I don’t mean at the micro level of FinFETs which is also a way of going vertical. I mean through-silicon-via (TSV) based approaches for either stacking die or putting them on an interposer. Increasingly the question is no longer if this technology will be viable (there… Read More
Double Patterning Verification
You can’t have failed to notice that 20nm is coming. There are a huge number of things that are different about 20nm from 28nm, but far and away the biggest is the need for double patterning. You probably know what this is by now, but just in case, here is a quick summary.
Lithography is done using 193nm light. Today we use immersion… Read More
HP Loses Its Autonomy!
HP buys Autonomy for $11B then does an $8.8B writedown?!?!?! Was HP swindled by Autonomy? As a long time HP customer I’m outraged by this behavior. Not just the over priced acquisition but the behavior of HP on a whole! Even today 4 of the 6 laptops in my house are HP as are my printers. How am I supposed to buy HP products with a straight … Read More
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot