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Intel Quark: Synthesizable Core?

Intel Quark: Synthesizable Core?
by Paul McLellan on 09-10-2013 at 1:43 pm

At IDF Brian Krzanich gave the keynote. I won’t summarize the whole thing here but just talk about one part that was something they had actually managed to keep secret ahead of time: Quark.

Quark is a synthesizable core. It uses 1/10th power of Atom and is 1/5 size. Now I am writing this, I don’t know if this is a fair comparison… Read More


GlobalFoundries Expands in Singapore

GlobalFoundries Expands in Singapore
by Paul McLellan on 09-09-2013 at 8:30 pm

GlobalFoundries has been in Singapore for a long time. Longer than GlobalFoundries has existed in fact. Chartered Semiconductor was started in Singapore in 1987 and GF acquired them in early 2010 less than a year after they were created by spinning out the manufacturing arm of AMD. When GF was started their state of the art fab was… Read More


TSMC OIP: Mentor’s 5 Presentations

TSMC OIP: Mentor’s 5 Presentations
by Paul McLellan on 09-09-2013 at 6:30 pm

At TSMC’s OIP on October 1st, Mentor Graphics have 5 different presentations. Collect the whole set!

11am, EDA track. Design Reliability with Calibre Smartfill and PERC. Muni Mohan of Broadcom and Jeff Wilson of Mentor. New methodologies were invented for 28nm for smart fill meeting DFM requirements (and at 20nm me may … Read More


TSMC OIP: Soft Error Rate Analysis

TSMC OIP: Soft Error Rate Analysis
by Paul McLellan on 09-09-2013 at 1:34 pm

Increasingly, end users in some markets are requiring soft error rate (SER) data. This is a measure of how resistant the design (library, chip, system) is to single event effects (SEE). These manifest themselves as SEU (upset), SET (transient), SEL (latch-up), SEFI (functional interrupt).

There are two main sources that cause… Read More


Xilinx At 28nm: Keeping Power Down

Xilinx At 28nm: Keeping Power Down
by Paul McLellan on 09-08-2013 at 2:26 pm

Almost without exception these days, semiconductor products face strict power and thermal budgets. Of course there are many issues with dynamic power but one big area that has been getting increasingly problematic is static power. For various technical reasons we can no longer reduce the voltage as much as we would like from one… Read More


Ecosystem: ARM versus Intel

Ecosystem: ARM versus Intel
by Daniel Nenni on 09-05-2013 at 2:45 pm

Ecosystem is everything when it comes to modern semiconductor design, especially if it is mobile. The fabless semiconductor industry has been all about ecosystem since the beginning and that is why we hold supercomputers in our hands today, believe it. After the invention of the transistor in 1947, and the invention of the integrated… Read More


A Brief History of TSMC OIP

A Brief History of TSMC OIP
by Paul McLellan on 09-01-2013 at 9:00 pm

The history of TSMC and its Open Innovation Platform (OIP) is, like almost everything in semiconductors, driven by the economics of semiconductor manufacturing. Of course ICs started 50 years ago at Fairchild (very close to where Google is headquartered today, these things go in circles). The planarization approach, whereby… Read More


Foundry 2.0: Why It Is Different And Why You Should Care

Foundry 2.0: Why It Is Different And Why You Should Care
by Paul McLellan on 08-29-2013 at 5:22 pm

If you have been to an Ajit Manocha keynote recently, he talks a lot about Foundry 2.0. I covered his keynote at Semicon West in July here. Dan Hutcheson of VLSI Research interviewed Ajit about this new business model to identify it, see how it was different and see how GlobalFoundries were executing the model differently from the … Read More


Wall St. Takes the Wheel at Wintel

Wall St. Takes the Wheel at Wintel
by Ed McKernan on 08-26-2013 at 5:45 pm

It now appears that Steve Ballmer was suddenly given his walking papers at the urging of an activist investor (ValueAct) and with the concurrence of Bill Gates. Wall Street’s growing impatience tends to coincide when the Innovators Dilemma scenario has taken hold of a company that has been unable to overcome its challengers. Why… Read More


Ballmer’s Retirement Leaves Nokia High and Dry

Ballmer’s Retirement Leaves Nokia High and Dry
by Paul McLellan on 08-26-2013 at 5:36 pm

It looks to me as if Ballmer’s planned resignation from Microsoft is going to leave Nokia high and dry without an operating system. Because any successor to Ballmer will cancel Windows Phone which has managed to take Microsoft’s penetration in smartphones from 5% before it had a serious partnership with Nokia all … Read More