The mobile devices market is simply exploding, with smartphones shipmentgoing up to the sky, tabletsemerging so fast that some people think it will replace PC (but this is still to be confirmed…). This lead mobile SoC designs to integrate increasingly more features, to support customer needs for more computing power and sophisticated… Read More
Apple Plays Saudi Arabia’s Role in the Semiconductor Market
The retirement of Steve Jobs left most commentators wondering if Tim Cook could lead Apple marching ever onward and upward. In truth, Tim Cook’s contribution on the operations side has been just as instrumental in the destruction of Apple’s PC and consumer electronics competitors as Jobs’ product vision. Under Tim Cook’s guidance,… Read More
Semiconductor equipment spending beginning to decline
Semiconductor manufacturing equipment shipments have leveled off after a strong rebound from the 2008-2009 downturn. August 2011 three-month-average shipments based on combined data from SEMI (North American and European companies) and SEAJ (Japanese companies) were $2.9 billion, down from a peak of $3.2 billion in May … Read More
A Verilog Simulator Comparison
Intro
Mentor, Cadence and Synopsys all offer Verilog simulators, however when was the last time that you benchmarked your simulator against a tool from a smaller company?
I just heard from an RTL designer (who wants to remain anonymous) about his experience comparing a Verilog simulator called CVC from Tachyon against ModelSim… Read More
Apple’s Supply Chain
I am doing some consulting right now for a company that shall remain nameless, and one of the things I have had to look at is Apple’s supply chain. I came across an interesting article by someone with the goal to “buy a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple.” He is in the UK and doesn’t like Apple’s… Read More
Custom Signal Planning Methodologies
It is no secret that custom ICs are getting larger and more complex and this has driven chip design teams to split up into smaller teams to handle the manual or semi-automated routing of the many blocks and hierarchical layers that go to make up such a design. These sub-teams don’t just need to handle the routing within their own block(s)… Read More
Analog Constraint Standards
Over the years there has been a lot of standard creation in the IC design world to allow interoperability of tools from different vendors. One area of recent interest is interoperable constraints for custom IC design. Increasingly, analog design layout is becoming more automated. Advanced process nodes require trial layouts… Read More
Coby Hanoch joins Jasper
Jasper has hired Coby Hanoch as the VP of international sales to manage sales outside of North America. I talked to him last week.
Coby started his career after graduation from the Israeli Institute of Technology as an engineer at National Semiconductor. He quickly ended up in verification where they developed the first random … Read More
Nanometer Circuit Verification: The Catch-22 of Layout!
As analog and mixed-signal designers move to very advanced geometries, they must grapple with more and more complex considerations of the silicon. Not only do nanometer CMOS devices have limitations in terms of analog-relevant characteristics such gain and noise performance, but they also introduce new sources of variation… Read More
AMS Design, Optimization and Porting
AMS design flows can follow a traditional path or consider trying something new. The traditional path goes along the following steps:
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