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
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
AI Semiconductor Market