One of my favorite classes in college was the lab exercise, mostly because we actually got to use real electronics and then measure something, finally writing it up in our lab notebooks. The issue today is that a college student taking Electrical Engineering probably doesn’t have much access to 10nm FinFET silicon for use… Read More
Frequent Semiwiki readers are familiar with the importance of close collaboration between the foundries and EDA tool developers, to provide the crucial features required by new process nodes. Perhaps the best illustration of the significance of this collaboration is the technical evolution of layout parasitic extraction.… Read More
I’d wager that if I mention autonomous vehicles, the first thing that you would think of would be autonomous cars. The truth is that we will see many other kinds autonomous vehicles in the years ahead. Their applications will range from package delivery to saving lives on the battlefield. Of course, to some extent they are already… Read More
FPGA’s are the new superstar in the world of Machine Learning and Cloud Computing, and with new methods of implementing them in SOC’s there will be even more growth ahead. FPGA’s started out as a cost effective method for implementing logic without having to spin an ASIC or gate array. With the advent of the web and high performance… Read More
I have attended last week to the LETI Days in Grenoble, lasting two days to mark the 50[SUP]th[/SUP] anniversary of the CEA subsidiary. Attending to the LETI Days is always a rich experience: LETI is a research center counting about 3000 research engineers, but LETI is also a start-up nursery. The presentations are ranging from … Read More
While some might have expected the exponential growth in design rules number and complexity to cool down a little, it looks as if these are only heating up more. The multiplicity of technology nodes, lithography options, , fundamental technology options (Bulk, FD-SOI, FinFET), different process flavors and specific applications,… Read More
A couple of recent semiwiki articles reviewed highlights of the annual TSMC Technical Symposium recently held in Santa Clara (links here, here, and here). One of the captivating sessions at every symposium is the status of the Design Enablement for emerging technologies, presented at this year’s event by Suk Lee, Senior… Read More
For an industry that drives improvement at an exponential rate it is funny how often something old is new again. Intel went into high volume production on 22nm in 2011, and TSMC and Samsung have both had 20nm technologies in production for several years. And yet, recently we have seen renewed interest in 22nm. GLOBALFOUNDRIES has… Read More
As you all know I’m a big fan of the ASIC business dating back to the start of the fabless semiconductor transformation where anybody could send a design spec to an ASIC company and get a chip back. The ASIC business model also started the smart phone revolution when Samsung built the first Apple SoCs for the iPhones and iPads.
Today … Read More
eSilicon presented their advanced ASIC design capabilities at a seminar last Wednesday evening. This event was closed to the press, bloggers and analysts, but I managed to get some details from a friend who attended. The event title was: “Advanced ASICs for the Cloud-Computing Era: Succeeding with 56G SerDes, HBM2, 2.5D and FinFET… Read More
