The recent (August) flash memory summit in Santa Clara had a session devoted to ReRAM as well as featuring prominently in the keynote address by Sung Wook Park of SK Hynix. The talk includes a summary of NAND’s well known scaling issues along with approaches to 3D NAND. It turns out that they are working on three different technologies:… Read More


Tensilica Ships 2 Billionth Core
It was in June of last year that Tensilica announced that they (or rather their licensees) had shipped one billion cores. Now they have just announced that they have shipped two billion cores. They are shipping at a run-rate of 800 million cores per year, which is 50% higher than June last year. If business continues to grow they will… Read More
The Middle is A Bad Place to Be if You’re a CPU Board
In a discussion with one of my PR network recently, I found myself thinking out loud that if the merchant SoC market is getting squeezed hard, that validates something I’ve been thinking – the merchant CPU board market is dying from the middle out.… Read More
ICCAD: 30 years
ICCAD is November 5th to 8th in the Hilton San Jose (downtown).
It is very off topic, but if you are British then November 5th is the rough equivalent of July 4th when there are fireworks displays all over the country. Britain is one of very few countries that transitioned from some sort of autocracy to a democracy without having a revolution.… Read More
How Big is Mobile? Twice as many people use mobile phones than use a toothbrush
How big is mobile? Well, sometime early next year (or maybe even in the Christmas surge) there will be more mobile phones than people. Technically that is subscribers, so some of those “phones” are actually spare SIM-cards in international travelers’ pockets. But even so that is an incredible statistic. Also,… Read More
Soft IP Quality Standards
As SoC design has transformed from being about writing RTL and more towards IP assembly, the issue of IP quality has become increasingly important. In 2011 TSMC and Atrenta launched the soft IP qualification program. Since then, 13 partners have joined the program.
IP quality is multi-faceted but at the most basic level, an IP block… Read More
Designing with FinFETs
Intel is the number one semiconductor company in the world and has taken the lead in bringing FinFET (aka Tri-Gate) silicon to market at the 22nm node starting in May 2011, so now we see the pure play foundries playing catch-up and start talking about their own FinFET roadmaps. IC designers and layout engineers want to know how their… Read More
ReRAM Cell Switching and Trends
Confused by the way a ReRAM cell behaves? Looking for a clear definition of the various terms used? Then check out Blogs at ReRAM-Forum.com. on recent publications appearing in the IEEE journals. The latest Blog discusses a paper published by Professor Daniele Ielmini of the Politecnico di Milano in Italy on the Resistive Switching… Read More
SOI need a large IP Ecosystem, 100% Reliable Novocell NVM IP is now part of IBM SOI 32nm ecosystem
When a company develops chip for the military industry, I would prefer these chips to be using a 100% reliable technology. I am sure that you too! For certain application, 99%, or even 99.99% rate of confidence is not enough. Would you accept to fly in an airplane if you still have 1 out of 10,000 chances to crash? Would you accept living… Read More
Silicon Correlation, Not EDA Marketing Sparkles!
It’s all about the silicon. It’s all about silicon correlation. TSMC Open Integration Platform should be renamed TSMC Silicon Correlation Platform or TSMC SCP. One of the problems I have with EDA technical papers today is that they are not silicon based. Anybody can put up slides with marketing sparkles on them but if you want qualified… Read More
TSMC N3 Process Technology Wiki