IC designers contemplating the transition to 16nm FinFET technology for their next SoC need to be informed about design flow and IP changes, so TSMC teamed up with Cadence Design Systems today to present a webinar on that topic. I attended the webinar and will summarize my findings.
Shown below is a 3D layout concept of an ideal FinFET… Read More
At TSMC’s latest earnings call held mid January 2014, an analyst asked TSMC for a revenue forecast for their emerging 2.5/3D product line. C.C. Wei, President and Co-CEO answered: “800 Million Dollars in 2016 ”. TSMC has demonstrated great vision many times before. For me, an enthusiastic supporter of this technology, this statement… Read More
By I-o-P, I mean Internet-of-People- I couldn’t think of anything better than this to describe a technology which becomes your custodian for everything you do; you may consider it as your good companion through life or an invariably controlling spy. This is obvious with the embedded sensor techno-products such as Kolibree, a … Read More
The first keynote at the Burlingame 3D conference was by Doug Yu of TSMC. Not surprisingly he was talking about 3D. In particular, TSMC has WLSI technology that they call CoWoS, which stands for chip-on-wafer-on-substrate which pretty much describes how it is built. This is the technology that Xilinx uses for its recently announced… Read More
This week Xilinx has announced that “The Xilinx 20nm All Programmable UltraScale™ portfolio is now available with detailed device tables, product documentation, design tools and methodology support.”
Do you know what 20nm is? It’s small, tiny. Think about it this way, as I just learned today that one nanometer is about as long… Read More
A couple of weeks ago, Xilinx and TSMC announced the production release of the Virtex-7 HT family, the industry’s first heterogeneous 3D ICs in production. With this milestone, all Xilinx 28nm 3D IC families are now in volume production. These 28nm devices were developed on TSMC’s Chip-on-Wafer-on-Substrate (CoWoS)… Read More
GlobalFoundries had several interesting things at the ARM TechCon last week. Firstly, GlobalFoundries won the best in show award in the chip design category recognizing the best-in-class technologies introduced since the last TechCon.
Earlier in the summer GlobalFoundries and ARM announced the ARM Cortex-A12 processor,… Read More
Today Micron announced that it is shipping 2GB Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) samples. The HMC is actually 5 stacked die connected with through-silicon-vias (TSVs). The bottom die is a logic chip and is actually manufactured for Micron in an IBM 32nm process (and doesn’t have any TSVs). The other 4 die are 4Gb DRAM die manufactured… Read More
Today TSMC announced three reference flows that they have been working on along with various EDA vendors (and ARM and perhaps other IP suppliers). The three new flows are:
Lately I was studying about new innovations in memory world such as ReRAM and Memristor. As DRAM (although it has become a commodity) has found its extensive use in mobile, PC, tablet and so on, that was an inclination too to know more about. While reviewing Cadence’s offering in memory subsystems, I came across this whitepaperwhich… Read More
