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HP, Palm, tablets, PCs, smartphones

HP, Palm, tablets, PCs, smartphones
by Paul McLellan on 08-19-2011 at 2:54 pm

Hewlett-Packard purchased Palm last year for over a billion dollars primarily to get their hands on the WebOS operating system for powering its tablets and smartphones. It’s turned out to be much too little too late. Despite WebOS being a new operating system with many attractive features, HP’s tablet offering, … Read More


Top 5 Reasons for Wasting Power

Top 5 Reasons for Wasting Power
by Paul McLellan on 08-19-2011 at 2:27 pm

Traditionally, David Letterman style, we should really have the top 10 reasons for wasting power in semiconductor design, but here are the five big ones.

Starting with reason #5: Lack of a power gating strategy
Leakage power is a huge proportion of total power and the only way to save leakage power (apart from low leakage cells when… Read More


Design Constraints

Design Constraints
by Paul McLellan on 08-19-2011 at 2:12 pm

Design constraints, which express higher level design intent, are one of the pieces of ancillary data that are critical to the success or failure of a custom (in fact any) design. Design constraints aren’t usually contained within layout files or library information, but without these critical data, designs may not meet specifications.… Read More


Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron

Intel’s Back to the Future Buy of Micron
by Ed McKernan on 08-19-2011 at 5:14 am


In an interview that Gordon Moore gave in early 2000, the former co-founder of Intel recounted how they abandoned the DRAM market in the early 1980s in order to exit the increasingly unprofitable business and focus on the promising, yet still young x86 processor market. Intel was also home to EEPROM and NOR Flash, two memory technologies… Read More


Aug 25th in Fremont, CA – Hands on Calibre workshop: DRC, LVS, xRC, ERC, DFM

Aug 25th in Fremont, CA – Hands on Calibre workshop: DRC, LVS, xRC, ERC, DFM
by Daniel Payne on 08-18-2011 at 10:30 am

I’ve blogged about the Calibre family of IC design tools before:

Smart Fill replaced Dummy Fill Approach in a DFM Flow
DRC Wiki
Graphical DRC vs Text-based DRC
Getting Real time Calibre DRC Results with Custom IC Editing
Transistor-level Electrical Rule Checking
Who Needs a 3D Field Solver for IC Design?
Prevention is BetterRead More


MUSIC in Bangalore

MUSIC in Bangalore
by Paul McLellan on 08-17-2011 at 7:18 pm

When you think of Indian music you might think of ragas for the sitar. But when you think of Indian MUSIC, that is the Magma user group meeting (Magma Users Summit for Integrated Circuits) coming up on September 7th in Bangalore (note: the date has changed from when it was originally announced). It is at Vivanta by Taj on M G Road.

There… Read More


Fast Track your SoC Design

Fast Track your SoC Design
by Paul McLellan on 08-17-2011 at 5:24 pm

Atrenta has four seminars coming up on SoC realization. More and more design is actually about finding IP and integrating it together at the block level, and then handing it off to a standard RTL to GDSII flow. The three focus areas are:

  • finding quality IP faster
  • accelerating IP integration and SoC assembly
  • handing off RTL successfully.
Read More

ANSYS Regional Conference

ANSYS Regional Conference
by Paul McLellan on 08-17-2011 at 3:15 pm

Next Tuesday, August 23rd, is the ANSYS Regional Conference for Silicon Valley. It takes place at the Techmart Network Meeting Center. Apache has three presentations during the day:

  • 9.25-9.45 Andrew Yang Introducing Apache Design Solutions
  • 11.00-11.30 Methodology for delivering power-efficient designs from concept to
Read More

Mr. TTL’s Future is Analog: Time to Sell OMAP to Broadcom

Mr. TTL’s Future is Analog: Time to Sell OMAP to Broadcom
by Ed McKernan on 08-17-2011 at 1:00 am

Mr. TTL (otherwise known as Texas Instruments or TI) has had a great run in the cellular market but it is time to decamp. The future is Analog and OMAP must depart to one of the remaining players looking to win the Smartphone and Tablet market. TI is exiting the market so it can focus on the high volume analog market.

On first sight, the … Read More


Captain Ahab Calls Out for the Merger of nVidia and AMD

Captain Ahab Calls Out for the Merger of nVidia and AMD
by Ed McKernan on 08-16-2011 at 8:00 pm

Call me Ishmael. Some years ago –in the mid 1990s – having little or no money in my purse and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail the startup ship Cyrix and see the watery part of the PC world. Whenever I find myself grim about the mouth or pause before coffin warehouses, and bring up the rear of every funeral… Read More