Exciting times for the semiconductor industry! Last week Intel announced a billion dollar fund to build a foundry ecosystem and today Intel announced they are acquiring foundry Tower Semiconductor for $5.6 billion dollars, WOW! Some people doubted Intel’s commitment to the foundry market this time. I think we can now put that… Read More
The last year has seen a ton written about the semiconductor industry: chip shortages, the CHIPS Act, our dependence on Taiwan and TSMC, China, etc.
But despite all this talk about chips and semiconductors, few understand how the industry is structured. I’ve found the best way to understand something complicated is to diagram… Read More
As the oldest and largest EDA conference, the Design Automation Conference (DAC) brings the best minds together to present, discuss, showcase and debate the latest and greatest advances in EDA. It accomplishes this in the form of technical papers, talks, company booths, product pavilions and panel discussions.
A key aspect … Read More
At the recent Design Automation Conference, Cadence presented their methodology for incorporating performance degradation measures due to device aging into a static timing analysis flow. [1] (The work was a collaborative project with Samsung Electronics.) This article reviews the highlights of their presentation.
Background… Read More
The incredible growth that the semiconductor industry has enjoyed over the last several decades is attributed to Moore’s Law. While no one argues that point, there is also industry wide acknowledgment that Moore’s Law started slowing down around the 7nm process node. While die-size reductions still scale, performance jumps… Read More
Earbuds are one of the fastest growing market segments, which is creating the need for audio DSPs with higher performance and a smaller energy footprint. More than just being wireless speakers – earbuds, and wearables for that matter, have become a sophisticated extension of the user interface of phones and laptops, etc.… Read More
Frequent SemiWiki readers are aware of the growing significance of heterogeneous multi-die packaging technologies, offering a unique opportunity to optimize system-level architectures and implementations. The system performance, power dissipation, and area/volume (PPA/V) characteristics of a multi-die… Read More
During his keynote address at the CadenceLIVE 2021 conference, CEO Lip-Bu Tan made some market trend comments. He observed that most of the data nowadays is generated at the edge but only 20% is processed there. He predicted that by 2030, 80% of data is expected to be processed at the edge. And most of this 80% will be processed on edge… Read More
As processor architecture and design development becomes completely liberated with open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA), the race to get RISC-V silicon in our hands has increased massively. We have no doubt that in next 5 years, we will see RISC-V based laptops and desktops in the market. But would these processors… Read More
Cadence invests heavily in the development of their Tempus Timing Signoff Solution due to its importance in the SoC design flow. I recently had a discussion on the topic of the most recent Tempus update with Brandon Bautz, senior product management group director in the Digital & Signoff Group, and Hitendra Divecha, product… Read More
