I’ve run SPICE circuit simulators since the 1970’s and they use transistor models where the device parameters are provided by the foundry. These transistor and interconnect parameters come from an engineer at the foundry who has characterized silicon with actual measurements or by running a TCAD (Technology CAD)… Read More
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) was last week in San Francisco. Stéphane Le Tual, Pratap Narayan Singh, Christophe Curis, Pierre Dautriche, all from STMicroelectronics presented a paper on A 20GHz-BW 6b 10GS/s 32mW Time-Interleaved SAR ADC with Master T&H in 28nm UTBB FDSOI Technology… Read More
Synopsys announced this afternoon that they are acquiring Coverity for $375M subject to all the usual reviews.
There are a couple of other big EDA connections. Aki Fujimora, who was CTO of Cadence, is on the board. And Adreas Kuehlmann is the VP of R&D. He used to run Cadence Berkeley Laboratories before moving to the other end… Read More
Do you know what an AMA is on Reddit? It stands for “ask me anything”. A person, often a famous person like Bill Gates (last week) but sometimes just someone who does an interesting job (like astronaut) or was in an interesting situation (like the hijack from Ethiopia last week).
Today, it is someone who argualble is all… Read More
DRVerify is part of the iDRM design rule compiler platform from Sage DA, something that I have been personally involved with for the past three years. DRVerify is mainly used to verify third party design rule check (DRC) decks and ensure that they correctly, completely and accurately represent the design rule specification. In… Read More
Power delivery networks (PDN) are the metal structures on a chip that delivers the power. In a high-end desktop SoC this might be delivering as much as 150W, and with voltages around 1V that means over 150 amps of current. Clearly getting the PDN correct is critical for a correctly functioning chip. One of the challenges to verifying… Read More
Sonics have been building networks-on-chips (NoCs) for a long time and have amassed a rich patent portfolio. So being granted a new one isn’t usually deemed press-release-worthy. However, their latest patent on power management is pretty significant. It is patent 8,601,288 titled “Intelligent Power Controller”.
Historically… Read More
Every ASIC company has a major challenge: they have to work out what it is going to cost to build the customer’s product and commit to deliver it at that price. Too high and you lose the business. Too low and you will wish you’d lost the business. Historically this has been done largely manually. This is an expensive process.… Read More
Atmel was founded in 1984. The name stands for “advanced technology for memory and logic” although initially the focus was on memory. George Perlegos the founder had worked in the memory group of Intel back when Intel was a memory company and not a microprocessor company although that didn’t stop Intel suing… Read More
It is microprocessors all the time right now, with Linley last week. Today ARM announced the next generation Cortex-A17 core. It is a development built on the Cortex-A12 core, itself built on A7 (which is the current volume leader). ARM says that it is 60% faster than the A7 core, although I’m sure a lot of that gain is a process… Read More
