ARM tests out TSMC 10FinFET – with two cores

ARM tests out TSMC 10FinFET – with two cores
by Don Dingee on 05-25-2016 at 4:00 pm

About 13 months ago, the leak blogs posted news of “Artemis” on an alleged ARM roadmap slide, supposedly a new 16FF ARM core positioned as the presumptive successor to the Cortex-A57. Now, we’re finding out what “Artemis” may actually be, inside a multi-core PPA test chip on TSMC 10FinFET.… Read More


Body-biasing for ARM big or LITTLE in GF 22FDX

Body-biasing for ARM big or LITTLE in GF 22FDX
by Don Dingee on 05-04-2016 at 4:00 pm

GLOBALFOUNDRIES has been evangelizing their 22FDX FD-SOI process for a few months; readers may have seen Tom Simon’s write-up of their preview at ARM TechCon. Dr. Joerg Winkler recently gave an updated webinar presentation of their approach in an implementation of ARM Cortex-A17 core.

By now, you’ve probably heard that 22FDX… 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


Innovus: Cadence’s Next Generation Implementation System

Innovus: Cadence’s Next Generation Implementation System
by Paul McLellan on 03-11-2015 at 7:00 am

Yesterday was the first day of CDNLive. There were three keynotes. The first was by Lip-Bu Tan, Cadence’s CEO (and the Chairman of Walden International that he will be the first to remind you). The most interesting tidbit was that Cadence now has over 1000 people working on IP and that it represents 11% of their revenue. Then… Read More


IP Market at Your Desk!

IP Market at Your Desk!
by Pawan Fangaria on 02-01-2015 at 4:00 pm

Semiconductors have played very important role in making internet successful and that has unleashed the potential of e-commerce. Today, we see names like Alibaba, whose primary focus is on commodity trade. I couldn’t imagine an e-commerce type of web portal for semiconductor services until I looked at the eSilicon website. … Read More


20nm IC production needs more than a ready Foundry

20nm IC production needs more than a ready Foundry
by Pawan Fangaria on 08-23-2013 at 11:00 am

I think by now all of us know, or have heard about 20nm process node, its PPA (Power, Performance, Area) advantages and challenges (complexity of high design size and density, heterogeneity, variability, stress, lithography complexities, LDEs and so on). I’m not going to get into the details of these challenges, but will ponder… Read More


Oasys Bakes a PIE

Oasys Bakes a PIE
by Paul McLellan on 07-17-2013 at 3:01 pm

One challenge in building a modern SoC is that you want to minimize power, performance and area (PPA) while still getting your chip to market on schedule. Realistically, you can’t actually minimize all of these at once since they are tradeoffs: speeding up a critical path often involves upsizing drivers to larger cells which… Read More