I attended the 3D packaging conference in Burlingame this week. The most interesting presentation to me was by Bryan Black of AMD. He argued very convincingly that Moore’s Law is basically over for the PC microprocessor business and the way forward is going to be 3D. AMD are clearly working on all this.
Increased density and… Read More
Donald Rumsfeld categorized what we knew into known unknowns and unknown unknowns. In a chip design, those unknown unknowns can bite you and leave you with a non-functional design, perhaps even intermittent failures which can be among the hardest problems to debug.
Chips are too big to do any sort of full gate-level simulation,… Read More
At Semicon Japan a few days ago, Subi Kengeri of GlobalFoundries delivered the keynote. While he covered a number of topics, using Tokyo’s recent win of the 2020 Olympics as a hook, one major theme was the increasing importance of processes other than the bleeding edge digital processes that get all the news.
What is leading… Read More
Yesterday Cadence had their annual front-end summit, the theme of which was physically aware design. I was especially interested in the first couple of presentations about physically aware synthesis. I joined Cadence in 1999 when they acquired Ambit Design Systems. One of the products that we had in development was called PKS… Read More
Two conferences on 3D, one just over and one coming up next week. The one that was just over was hosted by Georgia Tech, the 3rd Annual Global Interposer Technology Workshop (GIT). I wasn’t there but my ex-colleague from VLSI Technology Herb Reiter was. Herb has become very much associated with all things 3D since he led the … Read More
I came across an interesting article by Will Strauss which is pretty much the history of DSP in communication chips. Having lived through the early part of the history while I was at VLSI Technology I found it especially interesting.
At VSLI, our first GSM (2G, i.e. digital not analog air interface) was a 5-chip chipset. The DSP functionality… Read More
To the surprise of nearly all observers and due to no extraordinary technological advancement, there is one true mobile winner of the past year and that is Micron, whose stock has soared in 2013 from $5 to $21. I know, you’re probably saying, “Micron, you can’t be serious.” Let’s run through the … Read More
The first part of Lars Liebmann’s ICCAD keynote about lithography was on the changes in lithography that have to us to where we are today. In some ways it was an explanation of why we have the odd design rules, double patterning etc that we have in 20nm and 16nm processes. The second part of his talk was a look forward to how we might… Read More
eMMC is the standard for mobile memory used in smartphones and tablets. The latest standard, released just this year, is eMMC 5.0. The previous standard, 4.51, was only released last year so things are moving quickly.
Arasan have a webinar next week to bring you up to speed on eMMC 5.0 in general and, of course, their own IP offering… Read More
Yesterday Cadence had an all-day Signoff Summit where they talked about the tools that they have for signoff in advanced nodes. Well, of course, those tools work just fine in non-advanced nodes too, but at 20nm and 16nm there are FinFETs, double patterning, timing impacts from dummy metal fill, a gazillion corners to be analyzed… Read More
