Last week I talked with two experts at Mentor about the challenges of getting IC designs into the 32nm/28nm node on the Common Platform (IBM, GLOBALFOUNDRIES and Samsung). Global Foundries issued a press release talking about how the four major EDA companies have worked together to qualify EDA tools for this node.
Sudhakar Jilla,… Read More
EDA Mergers and Acquisition
I met Ian Getreu in Oregon at a monthly EDA networking luncheon several years ago and have kept in touch with him. Ian co-founded Analogy which was later acquired by Avant! (now Synopsys). One thing that Ian noticed over the years was that smaller EDA companies were constantly getting acquired by the bigger and publicly traded EDA… Read More
3D ICs, the state of the union
I attended the 3D architectures for semiconductor integration and packaging conference just before Christmas. I learned a lot and have put together an overview of what is going on in 3D ICs. This is not intended for experts (and if I’ve made egregious errors then please correct them in the forum) but more for people who are … Read More
Atrenta to Participate in SemiWiki.com Cloud Based Social Media Platform
Atrenta Inc., the leading provider of Early Design Closure® solutions to radically improve design efficiency throughout the IC design flow, announced today that it will participate in a worldwide social media platform aimed at facilitating mass communication for electronic design professionals through Web 2.0 technologies.… Read More
CES GlobalFoundries Party ( pics )
Unlike the last CES, this year I saw compelling technology, technology that will definitely drive the semiconductor industry and make the analyst fortunetellers look bad yet again. Anyone who thinks semiconductor growth next year will be in single digits is absolutely wrong, TSMC will grow even more, 20%+. First and foremost… Read More
EDA360 in PC Today
At the EDAC CEO panel, Daniel pointed out that he used EDA360 as a good introduction to non-specialists (e.g. financial sector). I just discovered today that the cover article of PC Today is by John Bruggeman (well, Cadence) about EDA360. Having some idea of just how difficult it is to get that sort of specialist article into a general… Read More
EDA / IP Business Model Debate
First, lets review the business model transitions EDA has seen. We started with perpetual licensing which is a software license for the life of the product. EDA companies did their best to change product names to get incremental revenue above and beyond the yearly 15% maintenance fee but that is a dead end business model for a confined… Read More
IP-SoC trip report (part I): how analyst sees the future of IP (and forecast the past)
I will share with you the most interesting I have heard during IP-SoC 2010, last December in Grenoble. Today, let’s summarize what I heard about the future of the IP business. The presentation was done by Gartner, in the “Auditorium” (largest room). It first started with the results for 2010, and I took some notes, as you can see the… Read More
Variation-aware Design Survey
Solidohas run an interesting survey on variation-aware design. The data is generic and not specific to Solido’s products although you won’t be surprised to know that they have tools in this area.
What is variation-aware design? Semiconductor manufacturing is a statistical process and there are two ways to handle this in the design… Read More
Magma’s new version of Talus and updating infrastructure
One of the important but often unrecognized aspects of engineering is re-building the infrastructure underneath key design tools. Sometimes this gives a new desirable capability but often a lot of the effort is simply to modernize the code base so that it is possible to continue development effectively going forward. For example,… Read More
If you believe in Hobbits you can believe in Rapidus