SEMICON West is coming up this July 10-12 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. It covers a broad swath of the microelectronics supply chain, but I was particularly interested in the test sessions. Here are two that I recommend.
“The Value of Test for Semiconductor Yield Learning” on Tuesday, July 10, at 1:30p. The… Read More
The days following a major conference like DAC are a good time to reflect on the overall health and vibrancy of the electronic design automation (EDA) industry. I’ve been in EDA for 21 years and built two successful startups, and over the last couple of years, have witnessed some decline in both new talent and in venture investment… Read More
I got an email from Mentor Embedded this morning about a webinar on Implementing a GENIVI-compliant System. I have to admit I had no idea what GENIVI is, which surprised me. I spent several years working in the embedded space and so I usually have at least a 50,000 foot view of most things going on there. One reason for my ignorance is … Read More
Have you ever heard of a Super Pillar Transistor? It’s one of many emerging 3D transistor types, like Intel’s popular FinFET device.
In the race to continuously improve MOS transistors, these new 3D transistor structures pose challenges to the established IC extraction tool flows.
Foundries have to provide an Effective… Read More
Smaller IC nodes bring new challenges to the art of IC layout for AMS designs, like Layout Dependent Effects (LDE). If your custom IC design flow looks like the diagram below then you’re in for many time-consuming iterations because where you place each transistor will impact the actual Vt and Idsat values, which are now a … Read More
Wally Rhines’ keynote at U2U, the Mentor users’ group meeting, was about Mentor’s strategy of focusing on what other people don’t do. This is partially a defensive approach, since Mentor has never had the financial firepower to have the luxury of focusing all their development on sustaining their products and then make … Read More
Mentor’s U2U user group meeting in Santa Clara is next week on April 12th at the Santa Clara Marriott. For those of you on the east coast the Waltham U2U is on May 16th, and for Europeans the Munich U2U will be on October 25th. Registration is open for both Santa Clara and Waltham, and there is a call for papers for Munich.
The day … Read More
I went to a couple more sessions at the Common Platform Technology Forum today, on 20nm double patterning and whatever will we do at 14nm. Basically, this is the end of planar transistors and the end of optical lithography. One session was by IBM scientists about process and one by Michael White of Mentor about double patterning. … Read More
Next Wednesday is the Common Platform Technology Forum. “Common Platform” is a name that only a committee could have come up with, giving no clue as to what it actually is. As you probably know, there are various process clubs sharing the costs of technology development (TD) and one of them consists of IBM, Samsung and… Read More
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
