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
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, 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
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
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 Better… Read More
MUSIC in Bangalore
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
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.
ANSYS Regional Conference
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
Mr. TTL’s Future is Analog: Time to Sell OMAP to Broadcom
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
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
What would you do if you were the CEO of Intel?