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Last month at DAC I learned how IBM, Cadence, ARM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung approach the challenges of SoC design, EDA design and fabrication at the 20nm node. Today I followed up by reading a white paper on 20nm IC design challenges authored by Cadence, a welcome relief to the previous marketing mantra of EDA 360.
Here’s… Read More
Over the years many attempts have been made to increase the level of automation in analog design. Most of these have not been especially successful. Probably part of the reason was inadequate technology but also there is an attitude that “real” analog designers design polygons on the bare silicon. I think two things… Read More
Qualcomm has a nice problem to have: too much demand for its Snapdragon and 4G LTE baseband parts. How Qualcomm realigns its manufacturing strategy around this problem will determine whether or not they can breakaway from the ARM camp and go toe to toe with Intel. Last week Malcolm Penn claimed TSMC was too big to fail. Really? The … Read More
EUV is the great hope for avoiding having to go to triple (and more) patterning if we have to stick with 193nm light. There were several presentations at Semicon about the status of EUV. Here I’ll discuss the issues with EUV lithography and in a separate post discuss the issues about making masks for EUV.
It is probably worth … Read More
What does mango beer have to do with semiconductor design and manufacturing? At a table of beer drinkers from around the world I would have never thought fruity beer would pass a taste test, not even close. As it turns out, the mango beer is very good! Same goes for 20nm planar devices. “Will not work”, “Will not yield”, “Will not scale”,… Read More
If verification is the art of determining that your design works correctly under all specified conditions, then it is imperative that we are able to create an environment that can tell you if this is truly the case.
Scoreboards are verification components that determine that the DUT is working correctly, including ensuring that… Read More
I attended a panel session followed by a party during Semicon to celebrate Soitec’s 20th birthday. Officially it was titled An Insider’s Look at the Future of Mobile Technologies. But in reality it was a look at the future possibilities for SOI.
Silicon on Insulator (SOI) has been a sort of bastard child of semiconductor.… Read More
One of the presenters at the standing-room only litho session at Semicon this week was Serge Tedesco, the litho program manager at CEA-Leti in Grenoble France. He is running a program called IMAGINE for maskless lithography. Chips today are built using a reticle (containing the pattern for that layer of the chip) which is exposed… Read More
There is an interesting Gizmodo review of an HTC Android-based smartphone. The basically positive review (as good as the iPhone, best Android phone at the time) ends up with an update:UPDATE: After more extensive testing there’s something a little weird going on. You’ll probably only see this while gaming, but there’s… Read More
Whenever I write about the handset industry, lots of people seem to be interested. As I’ve said before, my go to person for the industry but especially for Nokia, is Tomi Ahonen. He has written a long (and I mean long, it is nearly 30,000 words) indictment of Elop’s tenure at Nokia and how he has destroyed one of the most … Read More
Speculative Execution: Rethinking the Approach to CPU Scheduling