Since Imagination’s acquisition of MIPS at the end of last year, the MIPS product line has been given a new lease of life. There are two things driving this. The first is simply that with its new home, the MIPS architecture has a solid future whereas before it was uncertain. Secondly, Imagination moved their own general purpose… Read More
With the award of the Nobel prize for physics to Higgs (who used to work in the same building at Edinburgh as I did, reflected glory) and Englert yesterday, CERN has been in the news. ClioSoft has an interesting presentation given at CERN about designing a detector chips. The work was done two or three years ago, managed from Lawrence… Read More
One area of iteration that is becoming more problematic is between floorplanning and synthesis. So much of timing is driven by placement that fixing timing and even power often involves not just re-synthesis and re-placement but alterations to the floorplan. The Achilles heel of existing methods is that floorplanning tools … Read More
One of the highlights of the TSMC 2013 Open Innovation Platform® Forum was the Partner Award Ceremony. TSMC awarded Berkeley Design Automation (BDA) with the TSMC Open Innovation Platform’s Partner of the Year Award 2013 for joint development of 16nm FinFET design infrastructure. I talked with Ravi Subramanian, BDA CEO,… Read More
When new restaurants open they sometimes have what is called a ‘soft opening’ where they open a few days earlier than the official opening night. They are less busy since nobody knows they are open yet, maybe the whole menu isn’t available and expectations may be lower. Of course, Broadway productions also often… Read More
Yesterday was Dan Niles quarterly review that he does for GSA. As always he starts from the big picture of the world economy and works his way to a semiconductor forecast. The focus of this quarter was whether the world economy is strong enough for the US to “taper” and reduce the amount of quantitative easing (aka flooding… Read More
Today Micron announced that it is shipping 2GB Hybrid Memory Cube (HMC) samples. The HMC is actually 5 stacked die connected with through-silicon-vias (TSVs). The bottom die is a logic chip and is actually manufactured for Micron in an IBM 32nm process (and doesn’t have any TSVs). The other 4 die are 4Gb DRAM die manufactured… Read More
This time it is between the suppliers of semiconductor manufacturing equipments. And they are among the top ranked global peers. Applied Materials Inc., holding the numero uno position in sales of chip manufacturing equipments in 2012, agreed to acquire Tokyo Electron Ltd, the third in that ranking. Gary Dickerson of Applied… Read More
Apple’s decision to launch the iphone 5C as a “high priced” device as opposed to a $300 entry level mass market consumer play appears to be intertwined in a much more overriding strategic plan that is beginning to play out in the market. Many analysts who pushed for the low cost device saw the need as necessary to save the ecosystem but… Read More
The first thing to realize about Dassault’s Simulation Lifecycle Management platform is that in the non-IC world where Dassault primarily operates, simulation doesn’t just mean functional verification or running Spice. It is anything during the design that produces analytical data. All of that data is important… Read More
