I think by now there has been good level of discussion on FinFET technology at sub-20 nm process nodes and this is an answer to ultra dense, high performance, low power, and billion+ gate SoC designs within the same area. However, it comes with some of the key challenges with respect to power, noise and reliability of the design. A FinFET… Read More
Very recently, I was seeing intense discussions on the need for agile hardware development just like agile software and ideas were being sought from experts as well as individuals. While in software world it has already evolved, in hardware world it’s yet to see the shift in paradigm. My point is that the end goal of agile hardware… Read More
In today’s SoC world where multiple analog and digital blocks along with IPs at different levels of abstractions are placed together on a single chip, debugging at all levels becomes quite difficult and clumsy. While one is working at the top level and needs to investigate a particular connection at an intermediate hierarchical… Read More
Earlier this year, when I was looking at Carbon’spast year performance which provided record breaking revenue with whopping jump in bookings, one thing was certain that Carbon Performance Analysis Kits (CPAKs) would drive major growth in future, not only for Carbon, but also for the semiconductor industry. It will initiate … Read More
When we get the notion of expansion of a company, it always provides a positive picture about something good happening to boost that expansion. There can be several reasons for expansion such as merger & acquisition, formation of joint venture or partnership, large customer orders and so on. However, organic expansion which… Read More
The server market is a diverse, yet standardized market. The ICs and components designed and manufactured in final assemblies must meet form factor requirements for rack mount and blades. The form factor enclosures and the component placement dictate the thermal-mechanical properties and hence the thermal cooling limits … Read More
In the semiconductor design industry, most of the designs are created and optimized at the RTL level, mainly through home grown scripts or manual methods. As there can be several iterations in optimizing the hierarchy for physical implementation, it’s too late to do the hierarchical optimizations after reaching the floor plan… Read More
Of course that reduction has to stay throughout the design cycle up to layout implementation and fabrication. Since the advent of high density, mega functionality SoC designs at advanced nodes and battery life critical devices played by our fingertips, the gap between SoC power requirement and actual SoC power has only increased.… Read More
Once upon a time there was a struggle for verification completion of semiconductor designs at gate level. Today, beyond imagination, there is a struggle to verify a design with billions of gates at the RTL level which may never complete. The designs are large SoCs with complex architectures and several constraints of area, performance,… Read More
In a complex environment of semiconductor design where an SoC can have several millions of gates and multiple number of IPs at different levels of abstractions from different sources integrated together, it becomes really difficult to understand and debug the overall SoC design. Of course, along with the SoC integration, optimization… Read More
