I was the VP marketing at VaST Systems Technology and then at Virtutech. Both companies sold virtual platform technology which consisted of two parts:
Major power reductions are possible by reducing power at the RTL and system levels, and not just at the gate and physical level. In fact, as is so often the case in design, changes can have much more impact when done at the higher level, even given that at that point in the design there is less accurate feedback about changes. Later the… Read More
I am at ARM TechCon today. One interesting presentation was made jointly between Samsung, Cadence and ARM themselves about developing physical libraries (ARM), a tool flow (Cadence) and test chips (Samsung). It was titled Samsung ARM and Cadence collaborate on the silicon-proven world first 14-nm FinFET Cortex-A7 ARM CPU and… Read More
As semiconductors become more integrated into our lives reliability is becoming a critical issue. As IP consumes more of our die, IP reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we pack more transistors into a chip, reliability is becoming a critical issue. As we move from 28nm to 20nm to 16nm, reliability is becoming a critical … Read More
What an amazing night! I celebrated the 50[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary of the industry I grew up in! With my beautiful wife at my side and a table full of friends we all went down memory lane, ate, drank, and then enjoyed the auction.
The tour of the new computer museum was amazing. I was learning so much up until the 1970’s, then … Read More
In case you haven’t noticed, Synopsys has been in the press lately talking about their relationship with TSMC. Since I’m an internationally recognized industry expert they gave me a call for a briefing and I was happy to do it. Staying connected with the #1 EDA company is important and fun since I get to ask questions that most people… Read More
For the tenth year, the big 3DIC conference takes place in the Hyatt Regency at Burlingame (just south of San Francisco Airport). Officially it is 3D Architectures for Semiconductor Integration and Packaging or ASIP. This year there have already been some significant 3D announcements: TSMC’s 3D program, and Micron’s… Read More
One of the first blogs I wrote on SemiWiki was on clock domain crossing (CDC). I thought it was rather a specialized subject, a sort of minority interest. It turned out to be one of the most-read blogs I’ve written. Modern SoCs have lots of unrelated clocks, maybe hundreds, and so ensuring that signals going from one clock domain… Read More
In many designs, an on chip inductor is created as though it were simply a device with an L and a Q value. Of course this view would seem to make life simpler for designers and the tools they use. But in reality even a simple inductor is really a complex compound structure with many electromagnetic elements interacting in complex ways.… Read More
I talked this morning with fellow Brit David Halliday. More importantly, he is CEO of Silvaco, which he thinks must be the biggest private EDA company in the world. He didn’t reveal their revenue numbers but they have around 250-300 people and are profitable so you can make your own estimate.
David became CEO when Ivan Pesic,… Read More
