With use cases expanding, the meaning of “automotive qualified” semiconductors is changing. What we’re now hearing about now is beyond the AEC-Q100 Grade 0 upper end of 150°C, while still meeting other reliability, retention, and security requirements. What does hypergrade mean for complex digital chip… Read More
Tag: reliability
Can you really address the Automotive market with AP designed for smartphone?
If you remember, when TI decided to exit the booming wireless segment in 2012, the company decided to re-focus their application processor product line (OMAP) initially developed for smartphone “to a broader market including industrial clients like carmakers”. Being a TI employee in the 90’s in south of France, where TI has started… Read More
Should there be a 5-second IoT chip rule?
Kids have a tendency to put things in their mouths. Any parent can relate to the statement, “Put that down! You don’t know where it’s been!” After the first child, concern usually relaxes quite a bit. People joke about a 5-second rule on the premise if an object was just dropped on the floor, it may not be contaminated yet.… Read More
Optimizing SRAM IP for Yield and Reliability
My IC design career started out with DRAM at Intel, and included SRAM embedded in GPUs, so I recall some common questions that face memory IP designers even today, like:
- Does reading a bit flip the stored data?
- Can I write both 0 and 1 into every cell?
- Will read access times be met?
- While lowering the supply voltage does the cell data retain?
A Complete Simulation Platform for Mobile Systems
If we take an insight into the semiconductor industry, we can easily find that mobile systems are the main drivers of this industry. The Smartphone business has remained at the top since a good number of years. Although the Smartphone sales growth has started showing a sign of stagnation, it is still a main contributor with a solid… Read More
Predicting Lifetime of Analog ICs
With the increase of transistors per unit area, high density interconnects and manufacturing variability at lower nodes, the electronic devices have become more vulnerable to failures. The devices that operate under extreme conditions such as automotive devices that operate at high temperatures need to be robust enough to… Read More
A Key Partner in the Semiconductor Ecosystem
Often we hear about isolated instances of excellence from various companies in the semiconductor industry which contribute significantly in building the overall ecosystem. While the individual excellence is essential, it’s rather more important how that excellence is utilized in a larger way by the industry to create a ‘value… Read More
Experts Talk at Mentor Booth
It’s less than four weeks to go at DAC 2015 and the program is final now. So I started investigating new technologies, trends, methodologies, and tools that will be unveiled and discussed in this DAC. In the hindsight of the semiconductor industry over the last year, I see 14nm technologies in the realization stage and 10nm beckoning… Read More
SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA – Part2
In the first part of this article, I talked about some of the key business aspects along with some technical aspects like system performance, functionality, and IP integration that drive the architecture of an SoC for its best optimization and realization in an economic sense. In this part, let’s dive into some more aspects that… Read More
Silvaco: TCAD to Signoff in Vertical Markets
Recently, I talked about meeting with Dave Dutton the CEO of Silvaco. Mainly we were talking about the recent acquisition of Invarian but he also brought me up to date on Silvaco and how he is bringing their disparate product lines into a more focused strategy.
See also Silvaco Swallows Invarian
Silvaco would be the first to admit … Read More