Humans certainly have always had an aesthetic preference for symmetry. We also see symmetry showing up frequently in nature. The importance of symmetry in electronic designs has been apparent for decades. There are a host of analog structures that require balanced layout. For instance, these include differential pairs and … Read More
A decade ago, many of us heard commentaries on how entrepreneurs were turned down by venture capitalists for not including a cloud strategy in their business plan, no matter what the core business was. Humorous punchlines such as, “It’s cloudy without any clouds” and “Add some cloud to your strategy and your future will be bright… Read More
GDS and LEF/DEF each came about to support data exchange in different types of design flows, custom layout and place & route respectively. GDS (or stream format) was first created in the late 1970s to support the first generation of custom IC layout tools, such as Calma’s GDSII system. Of course, the GDS format has been updated… Read More
June 18, 2020
11:00 AM (EDT)
Venue:
Online
In the electronics industry, the capability of manufacturing suppliers greatly impacts the quality and reliability of any product. Manufacturing issues are one of the top reasons that companies fail to meet warranty expectations. Both process and design can play critical roles during
Physical verification is an important and necessary step in the process to tapeout an IC design, and the foundries define sign-off qualification steps for:
This sounds quite reasonable until you actually go through the steps only to discover that some of the … Read More
There is an emerging set of advanced packaging technologies that enables unique product designs, with the capability to integrate multiple die, from potentially heterogeneous technologies. These “system-in-package” (SiP) offerings provide architects with the opportunity to optimize product performance, power, cost,… Read More
Technology trends make the concerns with electronic noise a primary constraint that impacts many mainstream products, driving the need for “Design-for-Noise” practices. That is, scaling, and the associated reduction in the device operating voltage and current, in effect magnifies the relative importance of non-scalable… Read More
As feature sizes have shrunk, the semiconductor industry has moved from simple, single-exposure lithography solutions to increasingly complex resolution-enhancement techniques and multi-patterning. Where the design on a mask once matched the image that would be produced on the wafer, today the mask and resulting image … Read More
A few weeks back I wrote an article mentioning that Mentor Graphics has been quietly working on solutions for photonic integrated circuits (PICs) for some time now, while one of their competitors has recently established a photonics beachhead. One of the most common challenges for PIC designs is their curvilinear nature, thus… Read More
It is truly amazing to consider the advances in microelectronic process development, using 193i photolithography. The figure below is a stark reminder of the difference between the illuminating wavelength and the final imaged geometries. This technology evolution has been enabled by continued investment in mask data generation… Read More
