For all the time we spend thinking and talking about silicon design, it’s easy to forget just how important package design is. Semiconductor packages have evolved over the years from very basic containers for ICs into very specialized and highly engineered elements of finished electronic systems. They play an important role … Read More
With their current line-up of embeddable and discrete FPGA products, Achronix has made a big impact on their markets. They started with their Speedster FPGA standard products, and then essentially created a brand-new market for embeddable FPGA IP cores. They have just announced a new generation of their Speedcore embeddable… Read More
PVT – depending on what field you are in those three letters may mean totally different things. In my undergraduate field of study, chemistry, PVT meant Pressure, Volume & Temperature. Many of you probably remember PV=nRT, the dreaded ideal gas law. However, anybody working in semiconductors knows that PVT stands … Read More
We have all become so used to ‘smart’ things that perhaps in a way we have forgotten what it was like before many of the things we use day to day had sensors and microprocessors to help them respond to their environment. Cars are an excellent example. It used to be commonplace to run down your battery by leaving your lights on. Now cars … Read More
A large part of the effort in designing SOCs has shifted to the integration of their constituent IP blocks. Many IP blocks used in SOCs come as ready to use components and the real work has become making them work together. Network on Chip (NoC) has been a huge help in this task, handling the interconnections between blocks and planning… Read More
DAC is where both sides of the design equation come together for discussion and learning. This is what makes attending DAC discussion panels so interesting; you are going to hear from providers of tools, methodologies and IP as well as those who need to use them to deliver working solutions. There are few places where the interplay… Read More
FPGA programmable logic has served in many capacities since it was introduced back in the early 80’s. Recently, with designers looking for innovative ways to boost system performance, FPGA’s have moved front and center. This initiative has taken on new urgency with the slowing down of process node based performance gains. The… Read More
Dual in-line memory modules (DIMM’s ) with double data rate synchronous dynamic random access memory (DDR SDRAM) have been around since before we were worried about Y2K. Over the intervening years this format for provisioning memory has evolved from supporting DDR around 1995, to DDR1 in 2000, DDR2 in 2003, DDR4 in 2007 and DDR4… Read More
How do you ensure your design has been optimized for power, performance, and area? I posed this question to Mentor’s Group Director of Marketing, Sudhakar Jilla and product specialist Mark Le. They said that finding the PPA sweet spot is still often done by trial and error – basically serial experiments with various input parameters… Read More
Not only are foundries continuing to introduce processes at new advanced nodes, they are frequently updating or adding processes at existing nodes. There are many examples that illustrate this well. TSMC now has 16FF, 16FF+ and now 16FFC. They are also announcing 10nm and 7nm processes. In addition, they are going back to older… Read More
