I already talked about how Cadence is splitting Virtuoso into two. Anyway, it is now officially announced. The 6.1 version will continue to be developed as a sort of Virtuoso classic for people doing designs off the bleeding edge that don’t require the new features. And a new Virtuoso 12.1 intended for people doing 20nm and… Read More
I was at DesignCon in Santa Clara today and listened to Jonah Alben of NVIDIA’s keynote on what their approach is to improving design methodology. He started by pointing out that most companies underinvest in EDA (and he includes NVIDIA in this). Partially it is complaceny: that last chip taped out so we know we can do it again.… Read More
While the SPIE Advanced Lithography conference is best known for IC manufacturing, computational lithography, mask preparation and other back-end topics, there is also a significant amount of interest in Design for Manufacturing (DFM) at the conference because some litho issues are best (or only) addressed by modifying the… Read More
While founder John Tanner, PhD, got his initial exposure to the TTL Cookbook and CMOS Cookbook as an undergraduate, it was his experience as a Caltech graduate student that forged his early path in EDA. In 1979, while enrolled in a VLSI design course at Caltech, John and his classmates received a pre-print of Carver Mead’s seminal… Read More
SoC designers have always wanted to simulate hardware and software together during new product development, so one practical question has been how to trade off performance versus accuracy when creating an early model of the hardware. The creative minds at Carbon Design Systems and ARM have combined to offer us some hope and relief… Read More
DesignConis next week in Santa Clara, so today I spoke with Mark Ravenstahlfrom ANSYS to get an idea of what to expect at the conference and trade show.
Non-volatile memory is used in a wide variety of consumer and industrial applications and comes in an array of architectures like Serial Flash and CBRAM (Conductive Bridging RAM). I caught up with Shane Hollmer by phone this week to gain some insight into a recent acquisition of Atmel’s serial flash components, and how that… Read More
I sat down last week for lunch with Michael Sanie. Mike and I go back a long way, working together at VLSI Technology (where his first job out of school was to take over the circuit extractor that I’d originally written) and then in strategic marketing at Cadence. Now Mike has marketing for (almost?) all of Synopsys’s … Read More
Over at the GSA Forum website I have an article on the history of the semiconductor industry. It is actually based on a couple of brief history of semiconductor blogs (here and here) I published here on SemiWiki last year but edited down a lot and tightened up.
Since the start of the year seems to be the time for predictions, here are the… Read More
TSMC and Synopsys hosted a webinar in December on this topic of double patterning and how it impacts the IC extraction flow. The 20nm process node has IC layout geometries so closely spaced that the traditional optical-based lithography cannot be used, instead lower layers like Poly and Metal 1 require a new approach of using two… Read More
