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Not me. Who owns IP quality?

Not me. Who owns IP quality?
by Paul McLellan on 03-05-2012 at 4:32 pm

Now that the dominant approach to building an SoC is to get IP from a number of sources and assemble it into a chip, the issue of IP quality is more and more critical. A chip won’t work if the IP doesn’t work, but it is quite difficult to verify this because the SoC design team is not intimately familiar with the IP blocks since… Read More


Atrenta/TSMC Soft-IP Alliance: 10 companies make the grade

Atrenta/TSMC Soft-IP Alliance: 10 companies make the grade
by Paul McLellan on 03-05-2012 at 7:30 am

Last May, Atrenta and TSMC announced the Soft-IP Alliance Program which uses SpyGlass and a subset of its GuideWare reference methodology to implement TSMC’s IP quality assessment program. TSMC requires all soft-IP providers to reach a minimum level of completeness before their IP is listed on TSMC online. Since TSMC … Read More


Verdi’s 3rd Symphony

Verdi’s 3rd Symphony
by Paul McLellan on 03-05-2012 at 7:00 am

The first version of the debug platform Verdi (then called Debussy) dates back to 1996 over 15 years ago. The second version was released in 2002. And now SpringSoft is releasing the 3rd version Verdi[SUP]3[/SUP]which is a completely new generation. A tool environment like Verdi seems to need to be completely refreshed about every… Read More


TSMC 28nm Yield Explained!

TSMC 28nm Yield Explained!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-04-2012 at 4:00 pm


Yield, no topic is more important to the semiconductor ecosystem. After spending a significant part of my career on Design for Manufacturability (DFM) and Design for Yield (DFY), I’m seriously offended when semiconductor professionals make false and misleading statements that negatively affects the industry that Read More


The 2012 International Conference on ENGINEERING OF RECONFIGURABLE SYSTEMS AND ALGORITHMS – ERSA’12

The 2012 International Conference on ENGINEERING OF RECONFIGURABLE SYSTEMS AND ALGORITHMS – ERSA’12
by Daniel Nenni on 03-03-2012 at 9:55 am


July 16-19, 2012, Monte Carlo Resort, Las Vegas , Nevada , USA

ERSA-News: ERSA-NEWS ERSA’12 Website: http://ersaconf.org/ersa12

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CEO Forecast Panel

CEO Forecast Panel
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2012 at 2:40 pm

This year’s CEO forecast panel was held at Silicon Valley Bank. Bankers live better than verification engineers, as if you didn’t know, based on the quality of the wine they were serving compared to DVCon.

This year the panelists were Ed Cheng from Gradient, Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally (and if you don’t know who they… Read More


Farm Management

Farm Management
by Paul McLellan on 03-01-2012 at 5:34 pm

Every so often I come across a new company in EDA or one of its neighboring domains, new to me anyway, and new to SemiWiki. One such company is RunTime Design Automation (RTDA). They provide a suite of tools for managing server farms (or internal clouds which seems to be the trendy buzzword du jour). Running a few EDA scripts on a few servers… Read More


3D Transistor for the Common Man!

3D Transistor for the Common Man!
by Daniel Nenni on 03-01-2012 at 3:28 pm

The 1999 IDM paper Sub 50-nm FinFET: PMOSstarted the 3D transistor ball rolling, then in May of 2011 Intel announceda production version of a 3D transistor (TriGate) technology at 22nm. Intel is the leader in semiconductor process technologies so you can be sure that others will follow. Intel has a nice “History of the TransistorRead More


2012 semiconductor market could decline by 1% or more

2012 semiconductor market could decline by 1% or more
by Bill Jewell on 02-29-2012 at 6:00 pm

The world semiconductor market grew a slight 0.4% in 2011, according to WSTS. In early 2011, expectations were for growth in the 6% to 10% range. Various natural and man-made disasters lead to weaker than expected growth. The March 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan disrupted semiconductor and electronics production. Floods… Read More