I remember a couple of decades ago, my father used to go to a nearby doctor’s clinic to get his blood pressure and sugar levels checked. I guess, in around 1990s small electronic kits became available to measure these usual daily health indicators and instantly display the numbers. I bought a few for my father then. Today, the scene… Read More
Tag: semiconductor
25 Years of SNUG; 50 Years of Moore’s Law
Earlier this week it was the Synopsys user group meeting SNUG. Not just any old SNUG but the 25th Annual SNUG. The first one was 15th March 1991 and was attended by 100 people. At the time, Synopsys had annual revenues of $22M. This year, the various SNUGs around the world will have a total attendance of 10,000 people and Synopsys revenue… Read More
SoCs in New Context Look beyond PPA
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
SoCs More Vulnerable to ESD at Lower Nodes
Electro Static Discharge (ESD) has been a major cause of failures in electronic devices. As the electronic devices have moved towards high density SoCs accommodating ever increasing number of gates at lower process nodes, their vulnerability to ESD effects has only increased. Among the reasons for ESD failures in SoCs, device… Read More
2015, the Year of the Sheep…And the 16nm FPGA
If you live in California anyway, with its large Asian population, you can’t have helped noticing that it was the Lunar New Year a couple of weeks ago, the start of the year of the sheep. A couple of days after the New Year, Xilinx announced their new families of what they now call FPGAs, 3D ICs and MPSoCs. But which the rest of us … Read More
Semiconductor in China: Is 3rd Time a Charm?
China has recently announced extremely ambitious plans for becoming more self-sufficient in semiconductors. Today China is about 1/3 of the worldwide IC market but about 90% of that is imported. Think of something like the iPhone assembled in Shenzen with chips from TSMC, Samsung, Hynix, Toshiba/Sandisk , Micron and more (Taiwan,… Read More
Exensio: Big Data in the Fab
For 20 years PDF Solutions have been working with fabs on yield enhancement. Today, they announced their Exensio Platform for big data manufacturing environments. They haven’t really been keeping it a secret and have been talking about it at events since late last year, but it has basically been in stealth mode for the last… Read More
IP for IoT: Thanks for the Memory
The Internet of Things (IoT) is clearly the buzzword of the moment, and like many catchy phrases it also tends to mean what you want it to mean, rolling up some things that exist like the automotive market or industrial automation, along with markets for things like wearables and healthcare that are largely in the future. But however… Read More
Mentor 2014 Results
Yesterday Mentor announced their quarterly results. Since their financial year is not aligned with the calendar year, this was also the end of their fiscal 2015. The quarter was an all-time record with revenues of $439M and (non-GAAP) EPS of $1.09. The year was also an all-time record with revenues of $1.24B and EPS of $1.77. Half… Read More
Who Leads Semiconductor Innovation?
Semiconductor business is highly dependent on technology and that changes very rapidly in the semiconductor space. It’s important to recognize the importance of research and innovation activities in this space. In my last article on 7nm technology node, one respondent commented, very rightly, “It’s important to have competition… Read More