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
ARM and GlobalFoundries
Although there has been always a strong relationship between ARM and GlobalFoundries, it is interesting to notice that Intel has helped to boost it and make it even stronger. Indeed when AMD renegotiated its x86 licensing deal with Intel in 2009, one of the most significant long-term changes was a marked reduction in how much of … Read More
Process Design Kits: PDKs, iPDKs, openPDKs
One of the first things that needs to be created when bringing up a new process is the Process Design Kit, or PDK. Years ago, back when I was running the custom IC business line at Cadence, we had a dominant position with the Virtuoso layout editor and so creating a PDK really meant creating a Virtuoso PDK, and it was a fairly straightforward… Read More
Evolution of Lithography Process Models, Part II
In part I of this series, we looked at the history of lithography process models, starting in 1976. Some technologies born in that era, like the Concorde and the space shuttle, came to the end of their roads. Others did indeed grow and develop, such as the technologies for mobile computing and home entertainment. And lithography … Read More
Hardware Configuration Management and why it’s different than Software Configuration Management
Intro
On Friday I talked with Srinath Anantharaman by phone to gain some perspective on Hardware Configuration Management (HCM) versus Software Configuration Management (SCM), especially as it applies to the IC design flows in use today. In the 1990’s we both worked at Viewlogic in Fremont, CA and in 1997 Srinath founded… Read More
ARM vs Intel…Performance? Power? OS support? Or ubiquity?
This blog was posted 10 months ago, and the comments have made it much more interesting! Don’t miss the various comments at the back. Also feel free to let us know if you think the status, in this ARM vs Intel “war” has changed a lot since March 2011. Do you really think Intel has catch up with ARM in the mobile industry?… Read More
RTL Power Analysis and Verification
“Power is the new timing” has almost become a cliché. There are a number of reasons for this, not least that increasingly it is power rather than anything else that caps the performance that a given system can deliver. Power is obviously very important in portable applications such as smartphones because it shows through directly… Read More
Semiconductor Industry Damage Assessment (Disaster in Japan)
The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that devastated Japan on March 11[SUP]th[/SUP], 2011 will have far reaching ramifications around the world for years to come. People have asked me how this disaster will affect the semiconductor industry so I will try and summarize it in this blog.
First the foundries:
According to TSMC: … Read More
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