It is truly amazing to consider the advances in microelectronic process development, using 193i photolithography. The figure below is a stark reminder of the difference between the illuminating wavelength and the final imaged geometries. This technology evolution has been enabled by continued investment in mask data generation… Read More
I live in Tualatin, Oregon just a few miles away from the corporate headquarters of the #3 EDA company in the world, Mentor Graphics. Since DAC is fast approaching, I thought it would be useful to give you a quick overview of what Mentor is going to be talking about in Austin, Texas during June 5-9. … Read More
In the pages of SemiWiki, we are usually talking about what to do with billions of really small transistors – for a change of pace today, we’ll discuss what to do with a few really big ones. Mentor Graphics has just announced their latest MicReD platform for thermal testing of IGBTs, experiencing a resurgence (pun intended) thanks… Read More
Hardware emulation was conceived in the 1980s to address a design verification crisis looming on the horizon. In those days, the largest digital designs were stressing the limits of the software-based, gate-level simulator that was the mainstream tool for the task.
It was anticipated and confirmed in short notice that adopting… Read More
There’s an old adage, attributed to renowned computer scientist Andrew Tannenbaum, one that perhaps only engineers find amusing: “The nice thing about standards is that you have so many to choose from.” Nevertheless, IEEE standards arise from customer requirements in the electronics industry. Many relate… Read More
As I have mentioned before, semiconductor professionals are very smart people, pound for pound the smartest in the workforce in my opinion. So what happens when thousands of engineers from Qualcomm, Broadcom, Altera, and Intel get shown the door? They don’t go to work for Starbucks, they don’t go to the unemployment line, they … Read More
When you’re designing a hardware solution to plug into what is arguably the most complex system of all – the Internet – you can’t get away with a little fake traffic to test whether your box is going to do all the right things at the right performance. You have to model realistic voice, video, data and wireless traffic in… Read More
Next week is the Mentor U2U Conference in Silicon Valley. By chance I had coffee with one of the U2U keynote speakers while we were waiting for the FD-SOI Symposium to start last week and can tell you this FREE event is one you don’t want to miss:… Read More
The prevailing industry trends are clear: (1) PCB and die package designs are becoming more complex, across both mobile and high-performance applications; (2) communication interface performance between chips (and their related protocols) is increasingly demanding to verify; (3) signal integrity and power integrity issues… Read More
This year is shaping up to be an inflection point, when multi-die packaging technology will experience tremendous market growth. Advanced 2.5D/3D package offerings have been available for several years, utilizing a variety of technologies to serve as the package substrate, interposer material for embedding die micro-bump… Read More
