CEO Forecast Panel

CEO Forecast Panel
by Paul McLellan on 03-02-2012 at 2:40 pm

This year’s CEO forecast panel was held at Silicon Valley Bank. Bankers live better than verification engineers, as if you didn’t know, based on the quality of the wine they were serving compared to DVCon.

This year the panelists were Ed Cheng from Gradient, Lip-Bu, Aart and Wally (and if you don’t know who they… Read More


Farm Management

Farm Management
by Paul McLellan on 03-01-2012 at 5:34 pm

Every so often I come across a new company in EDA or one of its neighboring domains, new to me anyway, and new to SemiWiki. One such company is RunTime Design Automation (RTDA). They provide a suite of tools for managing server farms (or internal clouds which seems to be the trendy buzzword du jour). Running a few EDA scripts on a few servers… Read More


3D-IC Physical Design

3D-IC Physical Design
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-22-2012 at 10:00 am

When process nodes reached 28 nm and below, it appeared that design density is reaching a saturation point, hitting the limits of Moore’s law. I was of the opinion that the future of microelectronic physical design was limited to 20 and 14 nm being addressed by technological advances such as FinFETs, double patterning, HKMG (High-k… Read More


Pinpoint: Getting Control of Design Data

Pinpoint: Getting Control of Design Data
by Paul McLellan on 02-20-2012 at 5:39 pm

Back in the Napoleonic era it was possible to manage a battle with very ad hoc methods. Sit on a horse on top of the highest hill and watch the battle unfold, send messengers out with instructions. By the First World War, never mind the second, that approach was hopelessly outdated and a much more structured way of managing a battle was… Read More


DFM Industry Survey

DFM Industry Survey
by Beth Martin on 02-10-2012 at 1:28 pm

As part of the DFM Conference at the SPIE Advance Lithography symposium, the DFM committee is conducting an informal survey on the current state of Design For Manufacturability in the Semiconductor Industry.

Please take this anonymous 16 question survey to identify critical Design for Manufacturability (DFM) issues facing… Read More


3D Standards

3D Standards
by Paul McLellan on 02-01-2012 at 5:06 pm

At DesignCon this week there was a panel on 3D standards organized by Si2. I also talked to Aveek Sarkar of Apache (a subsidiary of Ansys) who is one of the founding member companies of the Si2 Open3D Technical Advisory Board (TAB), along with Atrenta, Cadence, Fraunhofer Institute, Global Foundries, Intel, Invarian, Mentor, Qualcomm,… Read More


Power Issues for Chip and Board

Power Issues for Chip and Board
by Paul McLellan on 01-29-2012 at 3:39 pm

Next week there are two Apache, a subsidiary of Ansys, events. At DesignCon there are a couple of workshops on chip-package-system (CPS). In addition to Apache themselves, each of the two workshops has a number of representatives of leading edge companies doing semiconductor design. I already blogged about this in more detail… Read More


SemiWiki and Mentor Graphics Seminar Series!

SemiWiki and Mentor Graphics Seminar Series!
by Daniel Nenni on 01-28-2012 at 10:49 am

For the greater good of the semiconductor ecosystem, SemiWiki and Mentor Graphics present SemiWiki Seminars, a free seminar and software demonstration series addressing the latest innovations in IC design. SemiWiki Seminars discuss interesting new challenges and potential solutions aimed at increased circuit density … Read More