We often think of EDA vendors competing with each other and using proprietary data formats to make it difficult for users to mix and match tools, or even create efficient flows of tools. At the recent DAC event in San Francisco I was pleasantly surprised to hear that two EDA vendors decided to cooperate instead of create incompatible… Read More
At the Samsung theatre (cutely named the Samsung Open Collaboration (SoC) theater) I watched a presentation by KK Lin on using DFM to bring up their 14nm and 10nm processes. And yes, they are real. Here is a picture I took of a 14nm wafer and a 10nm wafer. Samsung announced that they would ramp 10n to volume production by the end of next… Read More
We have been hearing about low power for a long time. Fortunately, low power chip operation has come about through a large number of innovations. Key among these is clock gating, frequency and voltage scaling, managing leakage with lower threshold voltage, HKMG, and many other techniques. But we are entering the age of ultra low… Read More
Last year at #51DAC we gave away more than a thousand printed versions of our book “Fabless: The Transformation of the Semiconductor industry.” This year we gave away pens with a light and stylus. My friends at Solido Design gave away 600 pens in their booth and we gave away another 400 at our DAC reception on Wednesday night. Solido… Read More
The CEO Fireside Chats were my very favorite part of #52DAC. Dr. Walden Rhines, Lip-Bu Tan, and Dr. Aart de Geus are heroes of the EDA industry, absolutely. I saw all three Fireside Chats and the one word that I’m left with is INSPIRED! … Read More
Actually, like anyone who has been in EDA for more than a decade or two (or three) I know quite a bit about Aart. But I still learned quite a bit about his views at the Fireside Chat at DAC where Ed Sperling talked to Aart for three-quarters of an hour.
Aart has a great talent at taking various small trends in the industry and aggregating … Read More
Tuesday night I got to meet an old colleague. OK, this is DAC, that is hardly a story. I was at the Synopsys media dinner and John Koeter handed out free wristbands to the Stars of IP party taking place later that evening. Remember, Synopsys is #3 in IP overall and #1 in interface IP. Talking of which, earlier in the day I was at the Synopsys… Read More
The keynote on Tuesday at DAC was by Jeffrey Owens of Delphi. For those of you that don’t know, Delphi used to be the part of General Motors dealing with electronics spun out from GM as a separate company in 1999.
Jeffrey pointed out that a modern automobile is the most complex device any of us own, with over 100M lines of code (loc)… Read More
There were two keynotes at DAC this morning. I think the official designation of the first one was a “visionary talk” and the main difference was that it was only 15 minutes long. Vivek Singh, an Intel fellow, talked about Moore’s Law at 50: No End in Sight.
He started with a graph showing transistor speed versus… Read More
On Sunday night at DAC this week I sat in the front row and listened to Gary Smith give his predictions about EDA and IP as an industry. His financial forecast was a $6.8B industry in 2015, growing to $9B in 2019. An ideal company for Wall Street to invest in would have slow and steady growth. If you add semiconductor IP into the forecast… Read More
