I can still remember the time, back in the mid-1980s, when I was at VLSI and we first discovered that we were going to have to worry about package pin inductance. Up until then we had been able to get away with a very simplistic model of the world since the clock rates weren’t high enough to need to worry about the package and PCB as… Read More
DDR4 Controller IP, Cadence IP strategy… and Synopsys
I will share with you some strategic information released by Cadence last week about their IP strategy, more specifically about the launch of the DDR4 Controller IP. And try to understand Cadence strategy about Interface IP in general (USB, PCIe, SATA, DDRn, HDMI, MIPI…) and how Cadence is positioned in respect with their closest… Read More
AMD and GlobalFoundries / TI and UMC
There have been some significant foundry announcements recently that if collated will give you a glimpse into the future of the semiconductor industry. So let me do that for you here.
First the candid EETimes article about TI dumping Samsung as a foundry:
Taiwan’s UMC will take the ”lead role’’ in making the OMAP 5 device on… Read More
Who Needs a 3D Field Solver for IC Design?
Inroduction
In the early days we made paper plots of an IC layout then measured the width and length of interconnect segments with a ruler to add up all of the squares, then multiplied by the resistance per square. It was tedious, error prone and took way too much time, but we were rewarded with accurate parasitic values for our SPICE… Read More
Wanted: FPGA start-up! …Dead or Alive?
The recent announcement from Tabula about the $108 million raised in its Series D round of funding is putting the focus on FPGA technology, and FPGA startups in particular. Who are these FPGA startups, what is their differentiation, where is the innovation, in the product or the business model?
When you say FPGA, you first think:… Read More
Samsung is NOT a Foundry!
Samsung is the #1 electronics company, the #2 semiconductor company, and for 20+ years the world’s largest memory chip maker. Analysts expect Samsung to catch Intel by the year 2014. In the foundry business however Samsung is a distant #9 after more than a five year investment and here’s why:
Foundry 2010 Revenue:
(1) TSMC $13B
(2)… Read More
DRC/DFM inside of Place and Route
Intro
Earlier this month I drove to Mentor Graphics in Wilsonville, Oregon and spoke with Michael Buehler-Garcia, Director of Marketing and Nancy Nguyen, TME, both part of the Calibre Design to Silicon Division. I’m a big fan of correct-by-construction thinking in EDA tools and what they had to say immediately caught my… Read More
Andrew Yang’s presentation at Globalpress electronic summit
Yesterday at the Globalpress electronic summit Andrew gave an overview of the Apache product line, carefully avoiding saying anything he cannot due to the filing of Apache’s S-1. From a financial point of view the company has had 8 years of consecutive growth, is profitable since 2008, and has no debt. During 2010 when the… Read More
2011 Semiconductor Design Forecast: Partly Cloudy!
This was my first SNUG (Synopsys User Group) meeting as media so it was a ground breaking event. Media was still barred from some of the sessions but hey, it’s a start. The most blog worthy announcement on day 1 was that Synopsys signed a deal with Amazon to bring the cloud to mainstream EDA!
Even more blog worthy was a media roundtable… Read More
Dawn at the OASIS, Dusk for GDSII
For an industry committed to constant innovation, changes in any part of the design flow are only slowly adopted, and only when absolutely necessary. Almost 10 years ago, it became clear that shrinking process technologies would bring a massive growth of layout and mask data—rougly 50% per node. This avalanche of data seriously… Read More
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