FD-SOI the Synapse Way

FD-SOI the Synapse Way
by Paul McLellan on 05-18-2015 at 7:00 am

Last week I talked to Marco Brambilla of Synapse Design. Synapse is a design services company headquartered in Silicon Valley. It was founded in 2003 by Satish Bagalkotkar and has been profitable since the beginning. Today it has over 700 people. In addition to the headquarters in Santa Clara, they have a software group in Colorado,… Read More


ASMC 2015: GlobalFoundries 22nm SOI plans and more!

ASMC 2015: GlobalFoundries 22nm SOI plans and more!
by Scotten Jones on 05-16-2015 at 3:00 pm

The Advance Semiconductor Manufacturing Conference was held on May 3[SUP]rd[/SUP] through May 6[SUP]th[/SUP] in Saratoga Springs, New York. ASMC brings a unique operational perspective to technical conferences related to semiconductors. In this blog I wanted to discuss what I thought was the most interesting paper of the… Read More


EDPS: Fins and FinFETs

EDPS: Fins and FinFETs
by Paul McLellan on 04-02-2015 at 7:00 am

Look at those dolphins with fins on their backs. Did you know that FinFETs are actually named after them since Chenming Hu and his team though that they looked like a fish’s fin? And since they invented FinFETs they got to name them too. But those dolphins also mean that it is nearly time for this years Electronic Design Process… Read More


SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA

SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA
by Pawan Fangaria on 03-21-2015 at 7:00 am

If we look back in the last century, performance and area were two main criteria for semiconductor chip design. All design tools and flows were concentrated towards optimizing those two aspects. As a result, density of chips started increasing and power became a critical factor. Now, Power, Performance and Area (PPA) are looked… Read More


FD-SOI Foundry

FD-SOI Foundry
by Paul McLellan on 03-16-2015 at 7:00 am

At the end of last month during ISSCC there was a forum organized by the SOI Consortium. It took place in San Francisco at the Palace Hotel (which, if you have never been there, is famous for converting its old entryway for carriages into an amazing dining room, and for a bar with a huge painting by Maxfield Parrish of the Pied Piper valued… Read More


Is Cadence the Best EDA Company to Work for?

Is Cadence the Best EDA Company to Work for?
by Daniel Nenni on 03-08-2015 at 7:00 am

Apparently that is the case. Honestly my choice would have been Mentor but I can easily make an argument for Cadence based on my discussions with the foundries and their top customers but more on that later.

Fortune Magazine last week added Cadence to the 2015 list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” citing a cultural transformation… Read More


Advantages when Designing with FD-SOI

Advantages when Designing with FD-SOI
by Daniel Nenni on 02-23-2015 at 7:00 pm

In total we have blogged 41 times about FD-SOI on SemiWiki which has drawn an audience of 202,960 thus far. Of that traffic 31.68% came directly to SemiWiki (Newsletter), 30.13% came from search, 26.17% from social media (LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, etc…), and 11.99% came from other referring sites. The most… Read More


Sony Endorse FD-SOI to Attack Wearable & IoT

Sony Endorse FD-SOI to Attack Wearable & IoT
by Eric Esteve on 02-10-2015 at 12:04 pm

We are writing about FD-SOI technology since the beginning of 2013 in Semiwiki. So far, most of the design experience was related to ST-Microelectronics (even if IBM and GlobalFoundries have been actively working on the technology, probably more on a research mode than pure production). Sony being actively working to develop… Read More


FD-SOI at Samsung

FD-SOI at Samsung
by Paul McLellan on 02-08-2015 at 7:00 am

Various foundries have made announcements about licensing FD-SOI technology from ST Microelectronics and then fallen quiet. GlobalFoundries made an announcement a couple of years ago. Samsung made an announcement just before DAC last year. But neither company has said anything much since. Of course the big noise at 14/16nm… Read More


FDSOI jump-start 2015 in Tokyo this week

FDSOI jump-start 2015 in Tokyo this week
by Eric Esteve on 01-19-2015 at 4:38 am

This news in May 2014 that Samsung had licensed FD-SOI Technology from ST-Microelectronics was really amazing, as most of the industry was expecting this kind of agreement, but not with the #2 SC Company. But since May 2014 the news flow has been quite reduced, we can imagine that both SC companies had a lot work to do for transforming… Read More