DAC has an interesting mix of vendors each year, and some of them are outside of the expected digital, analog or IP space. Last Tuesday at DAC I visited a company called Coventor that has three product lines:
Ever since I started talking about Virtual Fabrication I have mostly looked at it from the manufacturers’ perspective, where it has obvious benefits to develop and model new process technology. But what about the fabless design concept and indeed even the semiconductor IP world that has spawned from it as well? It seems that Virtual… Read More
With the 51[SUP]st[/SUP] DACapproaching quickly, I spent some time last week-end to look around about what new trends, technologies and innovations will be most talked about during DAC. Every year, I find some exciting new technologies in the semiconductor industry and the overall semiconductor ecosystem that get wider exposure… Read More
A Virtual Platform for any kind of design or manufacturing in any discipline of science or engineering (electrical, mechanical, aeronautics etc.) must be able to provide an accurate representation of an actual design/product in a fraction of time and cost it takes to build working prototypes. In the case of semiconductors at … Read More
MEMS design and fabrication is highly complex in the sense that the fabrication process heavily depends on the design, unlike IC fabrication which has a standard set of processes. A slight change in MEMS design can alter its fabrication steps to a large extent. For example, setting device parameters such as capacitance or linear… 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 design and manufacture of MEMS is very different and in many ways more complex process than even the most advanced ICs. MEMS involve multiple degrees of freedom (i.e. the device to exhibit different characteristics under different physical state, motion or mechanics), making fabrication of MEMS extremely complex; and hence… Read More
As I see the semiconductor industry going through significant changes and advances, yet ironically plagued by a growing perception that the pace of scaling is slowing, I was inclined to take a peek into what the industry experts say about the state of the industry and the future of Moore’s Law. Fortunately, at last week’s International… Read More
There is always a lot of posturing and pontificating when semiconductor executives talk about the future of process development. They are fighting an air war of perception and investor expectations, so naturally want to make sure they have plenty to brag about. But, as we pointed out recently with Intel’s problems at 14nm, moving… Read More
The growing process integration complexity at each technology node has increased development time and cost, and this trend looks to continue. There is a looming risk of delivering unrepeatable critical unit processes (or process modules) that would require revisiting development and manufacturing requalification or in … Read More
