If you are building an advanced SoC, you know that you’re going to need a lot of embedded memory. Unless this is your first rodeo, you also know that which memories you choose can have a huge impact on Power, Performance and Area (PPA) and, for some applications, Energy (power integrated over time), Temperature and Reliability. Which… Read More
Tag: asic
efabless: Think GitHub for ICs and IP
For those of you who don’t know, GitHub is the crowdsourcing version of the defacto industry standard GIT source code management software. Currently, more than 14 million people have deposited more than 35 million software projects (mostly open-source) on GitHub making it the largest host of source code in the world.
Now think… Read More
The ASIC Business Model is Critical for the DIY and Maker Movements!
If you look back at the beginning of the ASIC business you will see that it was really a critical time in the semiconductor industry. It all began in the 1980s which coincidentally is when I started my career in Silicon Valley. General purpose integrated circuits ruled the market, forcing system designers to cobble together off-the-shelf… Read More
How to Deal With Seven Design Closure Issues
The challenge of tracking design progress is a shared problem for individual designers, team leaders, and project managers. At each level the ability to step back from just reviewing error log files and seeing the arc of the whole design as it moves forward is valuable. The difficulty of seeing the whole picture is exacerbated when… Read More
ARM and FD-SOI are like Peanut Butter and Jelly!
When I first heard about a foundry possibly licensing FD-SOI I would have bet it was SMIC in China. What better market for a low cost, low power, easy to manufacture alternative to FinFETs? The foundry of course was Samsung which also made complete sense since they have 28nm gate-first capacity that matches up nicely to 28nm FD-SOI.… Read More
Mentor Extends Verification Offering!
With verification consuming more and more of the design cycle and the increasingly complex industry standard interfaces that are now common place, Verification IP (VIP) is again a trending topic. Back in my IP days the age old question was: Is it better to use VIP from the IP vendor? Because you know it will work, right? Or is it better… Read More
Apple Protects Its Designs With Custom Silicon And You Can Too
In the February 22-28 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek magazine, Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president for hardware technologies, discusses Apple’s winning strategy of owning its own silicon. It began with the acquisition a Silicon Valley chip startup called P.A. Semi in April of 2008 and since then, Apple has never looked… Read More
Upcoming ARM & Open-Silicon Webinar on Custom SOC’s for IoT
IoT products call for a higher level of system integration than ever before. Companies seeking to go to market now have a much higher bar in terms of size, power, reliability and manufacturability. The first IoT devices evolved from embedded development boards, like the groundbreaking Arduino. These were fine for prototypes … Read More
A Brief History of Open-Silicon
In 2003, when Open-Silicon was founded there was a growing need for flexible and innovative ways of getting chip designs manufactured. Semiconductor companies, given the alternatives of COT or traditional ASIC, often were looking for more flexibility without the huge investment and risk of going COT. Let’s look at how Open-Silicon… Read More
Leveraging HLS/HLV Flow for ASIC Design Productivity
Imagine how semiconductor design sizes leapt higher with automation in digital design, which started from standard hardware languages like Verilog and VHDL; analog design automation is still catching up. However, it was not without a significant effort put in moving designers from entering schematics to writing RTL, which… Read More